Homestead Gardener: Mining the wintertime mind
by Derrick Gentry –
Winter ponderings on goats, trees and an acre of riches
Away in a manger
It is mid January. The holiday season is just wrapping up on our little homestead, marked by the ritual of taking our Christmas tree out to the barn to feed to our goats. They strip it bare in one final flourish of holiday exuberance.
Goats are browsers by nature, not grazers. In the warm months, they love a pasture of alfalfa and chicory and timothy grass as much as any deer. But deep down, they would really rather be out in the woods nibbling on saplings and understory brush with those carefree bohemian deer (the ideal life, if only there were designated crosswalks on those back roads…). Throughout the seasons, we try to give our domesticated goats as much of a taste of the browsing life on the other side of the fence as possible: “tree hay” in the Fall, Japanese knotweed, sumac, multiflora rose, and other wild and invasive plants that are prevalent in these parts.
And then, inexplicably, for nearly two months in the winter, a lit up tree appears framed in a window of the house over where those people live a short distance from the barn. The trimming of the tree must seem as odd to them as the perverse ritual of delayed gratification. If there is something faintly comical about hauling browse to our goats, then there is something far more vividly so about giving domesticated goats a Christmas tree as browse in January.
We have a sick goat to tend to in these early days of the new year. Lyle – the only buck we have chosen to keep, the only member of our barn family who supplies us with no milk, whose only “function” on our homestead is to be his goofy and jovial self – has developed a swollen abscess around a cracked tooth, which quickly developed into an ear infection (a common problem with our short-ear breed of goats). From my own experience, I imagine it must be about as painful as a toothache combined with a sinus infection. Judging from Lyle’s expression, it is probably quite a bit more painful. After several days of attempting to treat the infection on our own, and hoping for Lyle to rally on his own, we finally had to resort to antibiotics, not wanting to take any chances with the stress of the sub-zero wind chills coming up this weekend.
Goats are ruminants, like deer, their body heat generated from the complex digestive processes that occur in their rumen. It is a useful built-in feature for animals who spend cold winter days in a barn. But the bitter cold January weather of this week taxes even the healthiest of ruminants. In the morning, I replace the frozen water in the barn with steaming hot water, which the goats all seem to enjoy like a hot cup of tea. We are watching to make sure that Lyle is eating enough hay to keep his furnace going. We have even brought him a warm blanket, something we have never done with any of our goats.
People sometimes ask if it is difficult looking after goats. Most of the time, in fact, they look after themselves. Yes, it is harder to find a goat sitter than a dog sitter. But the most difficult part of animal husbandry, no different than caring for a pet or any loved one, is looking into the eyes of a fellow creature that is suffering and not knowing what to do. In such moments a shared language does not matter as much as one might expect.
We will be keeping an eye on Lyle. This morning we found him sitting in a draft-free corner of the barn wrapped in the blanket we brought him, close to the kidding stall where he was born on the same day as his sister.
The view in winter
Nearly two feet of snow this weekend, the wind chill far below zero. Now it is winter for real. I think of Wallace Stevens’s “Snow Man,” which captures January better than any poem that I know: “One must have a mind of winter / to regard the frost and the boughs / of the pine trees crusted with snow … and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves.” It is a poem about snow-bound hallucination as well as impossible forms of mental self-discipline for the one who finds himself in the middle of it — “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Well, that is not quite the mind of the gardener in winter. In the off season, gardeners have their imaginations to keep them warm as they sit by the woodstove. I suppose we are not a very disciplined sort. We see plenty of things that are not there right now. We are also an easy target demographic for peddlers of utopian futuristic fantasies. On the table near my woodstove sits a stack of lavishly colored seed catalogs for next season, which began to accumulate well before the beginning of the new year.
But what really is there for a gardener to do in winter, apart from daydreaming by the fire? Not much to do in the garden, that’s for sure. The garlic and shallots were planted out in mid-November, the winter wheat seeded around the same time, and things get pretty quiet after that. The leeks are the first seeds that we start, but that doesn’t happen until well into February. We did enjoy a couple of brief thaws in December that allowed for the collection of a few more leaves and for adding another layer or two of mulch in the beds. But now it is January, and things have gotten serious. The lake is frozen; the ground is frozen. Outside the window there is a monochrome, bleak, snow-mulched canvas of nothing upon which to project our visions of the next season.
“Winter kept us warm, covering / earth in forgetful snow, feeding / a little life with dried tubers.” So wrote that other American poet T.S. Eliot, in what is likely the finest poem in English written from the point of view of a tuber. There are still plenty of tubers around the homestead waiting to be excavated, long after the kale is all gone and the hoop houses have closed for the season. The occasional thaws have allowed for periodic harvesting of sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes. Like the carrots that store well in the ground, sunchokes only get sweeter and tastier with every hard freeze. They have, at their prime, a sweet and nutty flavor with the crispness of a water chestnut. They make wonderful kim chi, and mixed with potatoes and fermented leek paste, a sunchoke soup that I have come to associate with exactly this time of year. Most of our sunchokes, however, go for winter forage; we make a little Waldorf salad for our goats, mixing the chokes with slices of apples culled from the ones stored in our root cellar.
I will be expanding our sunchoke plot next year, interplanting them with sunflowers. Actually, sunchokes — Helianthus tuberosus — are a species of sunflower. They also go by the name of Jerusalem artichokes, and I must report that a good number of non-ruminants gifted with language have come to refer to them as “fartichokes” on account of the bloating caused in some people by the high levels of inulin (a carbohydrate which, thankfully, gets mostly converted to sugars later in the cold season). Geoffrey Chaucer, by the way, may have written the finest lines on flatulence in English; you can dig them up yourself if you’d like.
Pondering the basic elements
Gardeners don’t let winter get them down, but winter does put a gardener in mind of elemental things. The processes have mostly suspended, leaving only the bare elements to contemplate: the what rather than the how, the simple components rather than the wonders of holistic complexity. The reductive mindset is one that I resist at other times of the year, but it is a point of view that one can easily adopt at this time of year. Among the elemental things are the elements themselves – I mean the inorganic ones on the periodic table that are the simple building blocks of the life of the soil and life itself – carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and the other non-living building blocks of life and the life of the soil.
From a composting point of view, a pile of dead autumn leaves is primarily a pile of carbon. Although it gets a lot of bad press these days, carbon (as we all know) is essential for composting. An ideal compost pile consists of about a 25:1 ratio of carbon to nitrogen, “green” matter to “brown.” That’s an awful lot of carbon, a lot of brown relative to the green. Winter is the time when we happen to have a lot of brown stuff harvested and stored up: golden brown straw, crispy brown leaves, sawdust and woodchips. When I mix leaves with some nitrogen-rich alfalfa hay in my 13-amp top-feeding mulcher, the fine spongy matter that comes out the bottom feels almost like humus in my hand. Microbes will make short work of converting it to actual humus come Spring. In the absence of biological activity, one can appreciate how much of the composting process is physical and mechanical, not biological — breaking down these materials and maximizing their surface area, in the right elemental ratio, so that microbial life can finish off the job.
There is not much composting going on now, with most of the microbial life gone dormant due to the cold. But a slow and steady process persists in the barn. The so-called “deep litter” method, if it deserves to be called that, simply involves fresh layering of carboniferous clean straw and sawdust and leaves in the right amounts as clean bedding for our goats and chickens. In order for the lasagna layers to compost properly in place, it is important to maintain something close to the proper carbon to nitrogen ratio. We have bales of seedy straw this year, which gives my chickens a fun indoor game to play as they scratch for the seeds and at the same time do the work of turning this cold-weather compost. Chicken do not need vitamin D supplements in snow-bound January, but they do need diversions.
Recycling versus mining
As gardeners, we do an awful lot of recycling in the form of composting and in various other ways. But sometimes our focus on the cycling of nutrients within elegant closed systems obscures the mining aspect of our operation.
The building of soil, like the building of empires, begins with the raw extraction of resources. There is a well-established mining operation on my one-acre homestead; my neighbors have also granted me mineral rights. Trees are the ultimate miners and scavengers, their roots going deep into the subsoil where there is little life but lots of minerals. They deliver these minerals from the lithosphere — the subsoil — and deliver these essential elements to the biosphere above in the form of … common leaves. I do not need to do the mining myself; all I need to do is rake up and mulch the leaves that contain all of the many micronutrients scavenged by the roots of trees.
These minerals and micronutrients go into the soil once the leaves have been fully composted. In terms of soil amendments, it is no exaggeration to say that the most important harvest of the year is the harvest of autumn leaves. Chemical analysis indicates that tree leaves contain just about all of the micronutrients that gardeners (and nutritionists) need be concerned about. No need for azomite or rock dust or rock phosphate or other amendments that are mined by humans and transported over long distances at great cost. Just rake up your leaves, along with your neighbors’, and enjoy this free gift of nature.
Not all leaves are the same, their value depending on one’s needs. Maple leaves are great for composting, and they are highly nutritious for goats who absolutely love the taste of them when they are newly fallen. Oak leaves, on the other hand, contain high levels of tannin and are not as palatable to ruminants, nor do they compost as quickly as leaves from maple or ash or beech. Walnut leaves are notoriously difficult because of the allelopathic chemical juglone contained in them; if you put them in your garden mulch, or if they are not fully composted, they may stunt the growth of your plants.
The tree, the whole tree, and nothing but the tree
Archival evidence suggests that at least some of our ancient forebears were super passionate about recycling and totally into zero-waste. A pig in the midden, after all, was an early community recycling program. Waste no part of the pig! That was a maxim for homesteaders of yore.
It is easy to take the same attitude toward the tree. This is our fourth year on this one-acre property, and the first winter of burning the stacks of split oak that have been drying for three full years. No fuel wood requires as much patience as oak. Ours is being fully rewarded. Oak leaves may present challenges for composting or as browse for ruminants, but oh how that seasoned oak burns! The only thing that gets wasted is the heat that goes out the chimney. With coppicing, moreover, you do not even need to fell and slaughter the tree itself, and the gathering of fuel wood becomes more like digging up and dividing tubers.
If you burn wood for heat, and you have at least one garden bed, then you know as generations have known that wood ash has value as a soil amendment. We burn between 8-10 cords of hardwoods each season and produce over 50 gallons of ash. Like the leaves of a tree, the ash that results from burning hardwoods contains within it a wide spectrum of trace minerals and is particularly good source of potassium (hence, the word “potash”).
As a soil amendment, however, wood ash must be used with caution. Yes, it is a great way to lime the soil and adjust for overly acidic soils with lots of additional ingredients not included in a commercially purchased bag of lime. But too much ash can easily throw off the pH of the soil, and alkalinity is harder to adjust for than acidity. Be especially careful using it as a nutrient amendment with crops like potatoes that love the potassium found in ash but also prefer acidic soil. More on this come potato planting time…
I take some care to strain out the charred bits from my wood ash before I apply it to my soil. Charcoal is extremely absorbent, and it will absorb and retain chemicals (like formaldehyde) that have not fully burnt off in your woodstove. You do not want these residual compounds, or bits of creosote, in your garden soil. For the most part, I have actually stopped applying wood ash to the garden beds and use it instead on the pasture and in the orchard. (I also apply it liberally to the raspberries, which love alkaline soil as much as blueberries love acidic.).
Check out https://www.owllightnews.com/homestead-gardener-making-biochar/for “Making Biochar at Home” and the continuation of Gentry’s winter ponderings. 
The continuation also includes some thoughts on the poet Mary Oliver.