Chapter 8: Future Plans

While the ground was frozen I used the tractor to drag the trees I'd cut to the areas I'd set aside as mangers for the deer. It was several weeks of hard work in the cold before I was satisfied. The tractor would easily traverse the old roadbeds despite the stumps if I kept the speed down. Nobody but a madman with a death-wish races around any fields in a tractor—they have turned over and crushed many an unsuspecting farmer doing simple things such as plowing or baling. Farm injuries and deaths are one of those nasty little secrets that people don't mention. Are they industrial accidents? Are they home accidents? Well, yes to both, but your home probably doesn't have a machine designed to cut off, suck in and finely chop tough stalks half the size of your forearm either! (Look up a silage knife or silage chopper.)

With nothing to really do I started thinking about second- and third-order effects of what I proposed to accomplish here. For example: if I planted a large garden then I'd have to fertilize and prepare the soil, pre-plant some seeds for seedlings in the conservatory, plant the seeds and seedlings then care for the garden, feeding, watering and protecting it from the depredations of hungry animals. Sure, fencing helps but deer jump better than any Olympic pole-vaulter on their best day. A deer jumping sixteen feet is no big deal. That's pretty hard to defend against. Shooting the critters is the only reliable option that I could think of, as scent baits sometimes work and sometimes don't.

All right, now I've got a few deer carcasses. What do I do with them? Butcher them, obviously. A commercial butcher would report the carcasses as taken without tags—a big no-no and Mister Sheriff would not be my friend. Alternatively, I'd have to build a slaughter house and a smoke house, learn some butchery skill, cure and smoke the meat. That's not a bad outcome if you like venison, and I happen to like it!

All right, your garden is going great guns. You have to water and weed it regularly. Once the crops begin to ripen you've got to harvest them. Some, such as tomatoes you harvest regularly until frost kills the plant. (For God sakes, don't plant zucchini without filing an ecological impact wavier!) Root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots are one-shot harvest investments. The potatoes can stay in the ground until the vines are dead, along with the turnips. Onions, garlic, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, radishes and other 'soft' crops have to come in when they're ripe, and can come in all at once! The catch-22 is that they taste the best when harvested the closest to peak ripeness that you can achieve, which leaves a truly minimal window to get everything picked, washed and processed.

You've made the investment in time and trouble to get the crops on the table. You can't eat them all at once so it's time to preserve them. Drying, canning and selling or trading them come to mind.

Then you still need to dig up the potatoes, turnips and whatever else is left in the ground, such as horseradish, before the ground freezes into something like concrete. Again, more time, more preparation and more storage are needed. You'll want a root cellar to store all your canned tomatoes and such as well as provide dry sand piles to store your onions, potatoes, turnips, horseradish and carrots.

Now, figure out the time investment in each crop and add them together. Are there enough hours in the day? Sure as hell not for one person! Add to this the maintenance tasks around the farm and caring for any chickens or pigs. You'll never retire. You'll die in your tracks and they'll dig a hole, roll you over and cover up what's left of you. There'll be one hell of a feast at your wake, though! Think of all that food you've put away for the occasion!

On the other hand we can get others to help. No, I'm not going to marry a woman with kids just to provide free labor. The kids would probably mutiny and run away anyway!

This IS a historical site. There aren't that many reenactment villages around. They're all further south where the documented forts and villages are. A conscientious contractor could no doubt reproduce a period black smithy. I myself could dig and lay a proper root cellar. I'd want to use unfinished sawmill-cut timbers, though. The whole thing probably should be set up at some distance from the house just to keep my privacy. A couple of the old fields could no doubt be re-purposed as a parking lot and a small village, such as an estate would generate. This was somewhat typical until around 1914 when the world changed. Mules were everyone's tractors. We could cheat and use the John Deere and its attachments to plow, fertilize, seed, cut and harvest the hay which we'd need to feed the mules and any cattle we'd raise. I preferred not to get into any sort of dairy operation because it was so labor intensive.