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Every fall we get cull sweet potatoes from a local farmer to feed to the hogs. What raw meat is to wolves, that’s what sweet potatoes are to hogs. Lisa tossed out about three or four 5 gallon buckets full to the feeder pigs this morning. Now, their lot looks like the carnage left after a bitter, bloody battle. Shredded potatoes, peels laying everywhere screaming out for help, the pigs almost comatose from sweet potato overload. One pig is laying next to the gate. He shivers every few minutes, staggers to get up, then eats a few more potatoes before succumbing to his full belly. Every once in a while, one of them farts, maybe trying to protect his little pile from poachers. This is not a battle for the faint of stomach.
In an odd twist, Brownie has developed a taste for sweet potatoes. I never knew dogs would eat them. He keeps stealing Petunia’s, and she chases him. I’m glad that we’re keeping Petunia because Brownie has gotten very attached to the feeders. He is going to miss them when they go next week. But he’ll have another 10 to chase and play with shortly.
I first came across this poem, “What are the Days” (Colette Inez – below) when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. It baffled me for the longest time because I thought the attitude it conveyed was a sell out. At that point in my life I wanted to cram as much life as I could into my days and to find out what they might mean. For me that was an academic and artistic path, consuming all the music, poetry, fiction and high brow conversation as I could. “They are what they are….nothing more” struck me as someone worldweary who had given up the possibility of finding a deeper meaning in life. “Hope I die before I get old” was more appealing than “They are what they are….nothing more.”
Fast forward twenty years, a wife and two kids, a mortgage, an overly expensive car payment, and so much more responsibility than I ever desired at 18 later, and I see “they are what they are” so much differently. For so long I lived with the goad of expectations and at the end of most days, I would be thoroughly disgusted with myself for having come up short. Each morning, each days seemed less of an opportunity to do something great and worthwhile and more a race against failure. One can only live like that for so long before cracks start to appear. One starts to, as Auden put it, “stare in the basin and wonder what you’ve missed.”
Slowly I’ve come to understand the power and freedom of “They are what they are….nothing more.” I have not become the professor that I aspired to be in my twenties. I have yet to publish a real book of poems or a novel, and most days I don’t come anywhere near composing poetry. I’m tempted to feel that I’ve let myself down. Life churns forward. There is no script already written that I or anyone must perform according to. This gives me freedom to live – succeed or fail – and allow my wife and children to be who they are and not become despondent when things don’t go according to my plans.
What are the Days?
by Colette Inez
They are pilferers
stealing our resolve,
Thomas broods aloud.
Or stones
to use for good or ill,
says James sitting
on a rock with Peter.
Soon, the dreamer
comes along saying:
all days are brothers.
Aren’t days fish
swimming to shore?
asks Simon, the fisherman
mending his nets.
They are coins to hoard
or to spend, Judas frowns,
and looks at his palms.
Twaddle, says Martha
running to fix supper.
You talkers, get me a hen,
get me an egg.
I bet you think
all the days are women
pouring wine and honey.
They are what they are,
says the hammerer of nails,
securing thieves
and the dreamer to the cross,
nothing more.
“What are the Days?” from Getting Under Way: New and Selected Poems by Colette Inez. Permission granted by Robert McDowell/Story Line Press.
Lately I’ve been feeling like Jacob in the Sarah Plain and Tall movie Skylark. I have been depressed with the dry weather. It’s been about three weeks since we’ve had any appreciable rain, and even that was a quick thunderstorm that didn’t even completely soak the ground under the plants. Not quite as desperate conditions as Jacob faced but still pretty trying. We are counting on our tomatoes, peppers, and beans to get us through until the next round of pigs are ready in October. Every day without rain made me wonder how productive the garden would continue to be. I don’t mind irrigating, but with our puny watering setup (garden hose and drip hose), when everything needs watering, it becomes quite a chore to keep a minimal amount of moisture on the beds. This morning a front moved through bring thunderstorms and a steady rain. It’s been raining for about an hour now and the radar looks like more is on the way. Hopefully the beans (Cherokee wax, Blue Lake green, King of the Garden limas, yellow Romanos, and edamame) which have been flowering for several weeks without pods will now put on pods. Hopefully the tomatoes which have been struggling with septoria leaf spot will push through the stress and start putting on new foliage and new fruit. Between my Dad’s garden and ours, we’ve probably picked over 300 lbs of tomatoes this week; I’d like to keep the harvest going well into September or early October.
I’ve been growing tarragon for about three years now. Each year it mostly goes to waste. Since I’m the only one in our household that really cares for the flavor, I usually forget about it and it gets overgrown. I planted four new plants this spring for a grand total of six. They’re doing well even though they have gotten a little weedy. I was weeding them last night and pulled off a branch by accident. I’m going to try to reroot it to make a new plant. I’ve tried doing this with rosemary before with no success. I think the rosemary stems I used were too woody to sprout new roots. This branch is pliable and green so maybe it will take. I am eager to get twenty or thirty of these going since the local chefs are keen to have it. I’m not sure if there is anyone in Sussex County growing tarragon commercially. I don’t think so – this would give us a lock on the market. 
I tasted a couple leaves and man, what a jolt! The flavor stayed with me for a good twenty minutes. I would like to figure out some ways to use it more. The tarragon isn’t the only herb we have that’s underutilized. Most summers, basil and oregano are the only herbs that we do a lot with. The lemon balm, sage, mint, lavender, and savory usually gets put on the backburner.
The phone rang about 6:30 this morning. Lisa picked up the phone, and my Dad was on the line.
“They are? … They’re out? … Okay, we’ll get right to them….” Lisa’s voice rose with exasperation with each utterance.
We ran to the window thinking Rose or Martha were halfway to Georgetown. Everyone was accounted for in their pens. Then we saw a bunch of little white critters moving around the farrowing pen behind Ramble. Dad had meant that the piglets were out of the house. At first Lisa and I thought he was playing a joke on us, but he was actually concerned that they wouldn’t be able to get back in the house. When I called him back, he didn’t get that someone might interpret him saying “the pigs are out” to mean that they had gotten out of their pens.
About 1 pm on Thursday, 4/29 Ramble started breating heavy and wouldn’t let Lisa leave her alone. I had to leave to do some shopping and pick Roy up from school. By the time we returned around 3:40pm, Ramble had just pushed out the first piglet. It took her another hour and a half to have the next one. Around 5:05pm, she delivered two back-to-back. I had thought about calling them Jacob and Esau but I have no idea which ones they are now. By 6pm, there were 8 piglets and 11 by the time we went in for the evening. She was still acting like she had another piglet or two, but we had to go in to take care of dinner and homework.
When I went to check on the new family the next morning, I saw two laying off from the rest of the mass of wriggling pork. I hoped that they were just napping but in my gut I knew what I was going to find. Overnight Ramble had delivered a 12th piglet – stillborn – and I guess she stepped on and crushed one was she was trying to pass the last one. I am thrilled that we still have 10 that are healthy and vigorous, but I was sad to lose 2 like that. Aside from the emotional letdown, there’s a potential $500 – $750 of income lost. But that’s just part of the deal – for a Momma hog to be big enough to have 12 (she was well over 700lbs) and for the piglets to be small enough to fit in there (they weigh about 2 lbs at birth). Every once in awhile the two come together, and you know which one is going to give.
 We are soon going to have some maintenance chores to do with the piglets which I’m not looking forward to. First will be castrating the little boys. I never look forward to cutting them, but I’m especially reluctant to take care of it with Ramble nearby. She is intensely protective. Though she is our sweetest sow, she gets very agitated when we approach the pigs or touch them. I’m probably going to have to lock her out of the farrowing house and do the deed quickly. So far, I’m not even sure how many boys she has because we haven’t wanted to get her too nervous. A nervous sow equals a less cautious sow around the piglets, which equals more crushed piglets. The other chore is weighing them to make sure they’re gaining weight. I imagine this will become routine and she won’t mind us handling them for that. But right now, we’re just standing back and watching. We haven’t had any reason to believe that they’re not growing with the way they nurse.
One of the chief dangers with farrowing, especially in confinement farms, is the danger of the sow crushing the piglets. (You have probably picked up on that already). Tamworths have a reputation for rarely crushing piglets but but I think that crushing deaths are minimized with most sows of any breed given room and treated with respect. We have noticed with both litters (from a Yorkshire and a Duroc), the sows have a routine to watch out for the little ones. Ramble grunts for about 30 seconds and nudges any that are under her away. Then she slowly drops to her front knees and grunts some more. Then she lowers her rear end straight down. Only then once she’s flush with the floor does she flop onto her side. The other factor that might have come into play the other night was that she was still in labor when she stepped on the piglet. When she was in labor, she was not aware of anything going on around her. The contractions were very strong and took a lot out of her. She didn’t move much for the first day or so after, taking a well-deserved rest. Now she’s up and moving around the farrowing pen.
Someone brought to my attention recently that I’ve been letting down on blog duty. The perfectionist in me waits until the time is right to produce a masterpiece, but as John Fogerty sang, “Someday never comes.” So I need to work on keeping in tune with the everyday things and put together an entry or two even if it’s not a perfect composition….
I’m looking forward to having next week off from my day job so I can get some real work done. So far, we’ve struggled to find time to get the first plantings in. So far, we have about 20 lbs of potatoes (Katahdins, Red Pontiacs, and Russets) in the ground, with about 60 red kale plants, 60 romaine seedlings, 150 red lettuce seedlings, some onions, and some spinach and radishes planted and coming up. I’ve got another 60 red kale plants and a bunch of onions and herbs to get out. Thanks to the rain the other night, the beds are moist enough to work up again so the garden should go through a great transformation by the end of next week.
Working on our tomato and pepper lineup for the summer. So far, it looks like these are the varieties we will be working with this summer:
Tomatoes
- Garden Peach
- Big Rainbow
- Cherokee Purple
- Dr. Wyche’s Yellow
- Blue Beech Paste
- Wisconsin 55
- Beauté blanche du Canada
- Super Snow While
- Black Plum
- Mortgage Lifter
- Lady Lucy
- Black Brandywine
- Principe Borghese
- Green Zebra
Peppers
- Gambo
- Chinese Giant
- Anaheim
- Cayenne
- California Wonder
- Orange Sun
- Colored Bell Mix
- Corno di Toro
I am an inveterate watcher and listener to weather forecasts. I always have been, but I tend to listen even more keenly now that I have to consider our livestock and crops. But yesterday I suffered a short bout of denial when the meteorologist said, “The Delmarva Peninsula will be under a Winter Storm Warning starting tomorrow evening….” I swore I heard him say that we could expect high winds and heavy rains only. Now it doesn’t look like that’s going to pan out. I just hope their predictions are right; after everything else this month, I think I can handle 3 – 6″.
With this morning’s rain, much of the snow that has coated our neighborhood is tranforming into slush, on its way back to the muck that gripped us for most of the fall. So, we’re back to square one. Getting to the goats is actually easy. We have to reconfigure the hogs quarters. We were going to need to anyway as we prepare to add about a half-acre of pasture for the feeder pigs this summer. But the mud between the house and the various pens makes it almost impassable. I lost count of the number of times that Lisa and I fell face-first into the mud back in the fall. As much as we hate to, we are going to ring the feeder pigs so they don’t completely destroy what sod is left on our pasture and in the pasture we’re going to lease from my Dad.
Growing up, I loved our farm. I loved all the animals, crops, woods, and the lifestyle. Though I was expected to work on the farm, it was clear that I was expected to be something besides a farmer. And when I graduated from high school, I really didn’t want to be a farmer. I didn’t understand the economics of farming and couldn’t see how I could make a living. And I needed to get out and see the wider world.
 Dad digging out our driveway after the December 09 storm Now I’m back, partly with the intention of becoming a farmer. A different type of farmer than the last three generations of my father’s family, but a real farmer nonetheless. My father has been skeptical of our ventures – our garden is always too weedy for his tastes; he thinks that our choice of hogs was a poor financial choice given the high price of feed and low prices hog farmers are getting; etc.
Last fall my father was diagnosed with lymphoma. He had surgery to confirm the type of cancer and has had two rounds of chemo since Christmas. The cancer has had some unexpected benefits, though. Early in the winter, through the three blizzards, I took care of his cows. He and I have been working together on the farm in a way we haven’t done since high school. But now I am actually responsible for many things that I only got to do go-fer type jobs for when I was younger – making sure they have water and the appropriate feed they need; keeping track of when the round bales need to be replaced in the pasture and putting them out with the tractor; figuring out the best way to contain the cows when the snow drifted over the electric fence and the cows were heading toward the road. These are standard chores on a farm, but I was thrilled that I finally had a chance to share in some of the responsibility. I’m working with my Dad in a way that I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid; unfortunately it took cancer to bring it about.
And it will probably be short-lived. I can only provide just so much help with my own family and farm obligations and full-time job. The cancer
 Dad clearing snow from around the fence and age are started to catch up with him. He’s considering selling his breeding stock and going with a few feeder cattle instead. But I have sensed a change in how he regards my aspirations as a farmer. At times, he’ll say, “Why don’t you go on and do what you need to do? I’m sure you need to feed your hogs [or have something else to do]…. I can finish up.” And he is open to letting us lease an acre of land for our hogs and goats. These might sound like small notes, but they ring loudly in my ears.
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