The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

This year, Loren and I have made a concerted effort to combat rising food prices by raising our own vegetables to go along with the meat we already raise here on the farm and then preserving them for the leaner months. That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see how it turns out in actuality.

As food for livestock has also gotten more expensive, so we have also planned ahead to provide for them over the winter. Loren has already spent countless hours driving around in circles on his beloved tractor making hay bales and has planted a very picturesque field of rye. He even bought a 1965 Massey Harris combine, a machine the size of a Sherman tank, to harvest it with. “Isn’t it great!” he yelled over the din of the engine when we went to buy it. “Spanking!” I halfheartedly agreed. I have yet to understand the appeal of farm machinery, but anything that helps feed the chickens is okay by me, I suppose.

As for our food, I have a lot to learn about the mysterious world of the vegetable. I freely admit to being a terrible gardener, although I have found that even I can keep one or two plants alive long enough to harvest and eat them. Last year, our garden was an unmitigated disaster with our vegetable crop being all but swallowed by a raging bout of knotweed. This year, after a winter spent housing our pigs, and being under a foot and a half of water in the November floods, and with a new drainage system, the garden has finally started to pay dividends. We have actual vegetables growing unencumbered by weeds or soggy soil.

To help out, my mother sent me some “good, English cabbage seeds” and for the next few Sundays, the same phone conversation occurred: “Did she sow the cabbage seeds yet?” I would hear my dad would ask in the background.

“Your dad wants to know if you sowed the cabbage seeds yet?”

“Tell dad I have not sowed the cabbage seeds yet, no.” Why Dad wanted to know is beyond me, but it’s comforting to know that even 6,000 miles away, my parents are concerned about my cabbage needs. It is probably for the best. I realized just how out of touch with this gardening fandango I was when I found I was mildly surprised to realize that peas come from other peas. Still, so far, we have some healthy looking potatoes, onions, tomatoes, greens and peas, and our corn, and beans are starting to germinate.

Once we have harvested the produce and in order for us to have food over the winter, I have been making attempts to preserve it. We have many books on the subject, most of which are full of illustrations of sturdy women in aprons, capably going about confining foodstuffs in jars. It is from these books I divined the mysteries of canning and the many, many ways it can go hideously wrong.

In my first experiments with blackberry jam, I paid close attention to temperatures, clean rims and everything else necessary to make sure I wasn’t nurturing some new form of biotoxin. What I neglected to take note of is that jam, which is essentially molten sugar, is very hot and putting it in glass jars does not cool it down. In fact, it heats up the jar to roughly the temperature of the earth’s core, which will then sear the word “Ball,” in reverse, into your flesh if you try to pick it up barehanded. Consider that a nugget of advice from my limited personal experience with canning and being branded by stupidly hot things.

I also tried my hand at making goat cheese. I followed the instructions religiously, pasteurizing the milk and letting it cool to the right temperature, adding the contents of a little bacteria packet, stirring, checking the instructions again because, it can’t be that easy, surely I missed something. In the morning, I was expecting to see gloriously creamy goat cheese. What confronted me, however, was neither glorious nor creamy; it was watery and looked not unlike something a baby would spit up. Disappointed, I gave it a prod and found just below the yellow whey, was the gelatinous mass of a curd. I had actually brought forth cheese, and hadn’t maimed myself in the process, which is always a bonus.

In the spirit of the sturdy women in aprons, we have also salted and cured our own ham and bacon from our own pigs, learned to make our own bread, and found that apples can be squeezed, slapped in a barrel, introduced to some yeast and fermented to make Puget Island Rot Gut, a cider that could quite possibly power our combine harvester.

Hopefully by the time that we get down to our last jar of canned tomatoes, either it will be time to grow more, or food prices will have started to fall. Hopefully, it will be both, as even though I am undoubtedly bad at gardening, there is nothing like picking your own sun warmed tomatoes off the vine. Then it will be time to brave the hellfire fury of the canner again, although this time I know to use oven gloves and a jar grip.