Pumpkin Season, Deer-Hunting Season

I'm not sure when deer hunting season begins, but people around here are starting to talk about it. Pumpkin season, on the other hand, is at its height.

This year, before they perished from mildew, my vines produced seven medium-size ripe pumpkins, and seven green ones. The green ones are still sitting on the patio table, in the vain hope that the season's vanishing sun will turn them orange.

The ripe ones are in the freezer, and it is of them that I wish to speak. I have in the past tried storing pumpkins and squashes in the basement. The temperature there is just right, but the mice are not. This year I decided to cook the pumpkins and then puree and freeze them.

But first, I had to kill the pumpkins, which were lined up in their orange glory on my blue kitchen counter. And as I got out the big chopping block, I began to think about deer hunting.

Compared to killing a pumpkin, killing a deer is a piece of cake. All you do is discharge a firearm at a comfortable distance and voila, the deed is done. Killing a pumpkin is more of a gladiatorial combat kind of thing, where I attack the fruit with my newly-sharpened Chinese cleaver as it hardens itself against my blows.

Bang! Bang! goes the cleaver, sounding not unlike the hunters in our woods. In my case, it takes a number of attempts before I can slaughter the thing, and even then the pumpkin, like Till Eulenspiegel, has the last laugh, as one half of it goes skittering across the counter and onto the floor.

Then comes the part where you “dress” your prey, i.e., eviscerate it, though why this should be called “dressing” I don't know. In the case of a deer, as I understand it, you make a ventral slit and more or less scoop out the innards. Dorsal or ventral doesn't signify with a pumpkin, but the scooping is really something. The inside of a pumpkin is chock-a-block with seeds, and these seeds are attached to the flesh by a gooey, stubborn, slithery mesh of orange threads.

I have tried scooping out the pumpkin's innards with a spoon. It doesn't work: seeds and goo tend to come apart suddenly and scatter everywhere. I have tried rubber gloves, to put some distance between myself and the pumpkin gore, but they don't work either. The only thing that works is my bare hands, and my fingernails. This is slippery, sticky work, and only marginally preferable to field-dressing a deer, because there is no smell.

I save the pumpkin's innards for the chickens. This ensures that the seeds, which pass undigested through their GI tracts, will eventually end up in our garden, to rise again in spring as thousands of volunteers, only a few of which I will select for the next crop.

Now comes the easy part: I chop up the pumpkin carcases roughly and steam them until they are soft. I put them in the blender and reduce them to a mush, which goes into plastic bags and in the freezer.

Bright-colored veggies are supposed to be good for you. The fruits of my labors, with a little salt and butter and curry powder, will go into soups and side dishes. They'll look nice on our plates, come winter. Now if we just had some deer meat to go with them....

A Fantasy

I have a recurring fantasy that usually hits around this time of year. Sure enough, with the cold snap last week it showed up again, and has been doing so regularly over the last few days. Maybe if I write about it it will come true?

It is evening in winter. As the first stars flicker in the sky, a lamp in the window casts a golden light on the snow around the house. Inside, there is a fire in the wood stove, and by the light a woman sits. It is moi!

I am wearing a fine woolen garment that reaches down to the floor. I have a serene and peaceful expression on my face. I am bent over some task.

(Wait! I forgot the critters! The goats and chickens are snug in the shed. The big dogs are asleep at my feet; the “spaniel gentle” sits on the chair next to me.)

But what is the task I am doing? I am making an object. I am drawing a small picture. I am carving a wooden spoon. I am making a clay goddess figure, or a cat or other tchotchke Or I am sewing a magnificent piece of clothing—a cape, say—entirely by hand. Perhaps I am even writing something—yes, writing counts as an object.

And this, sitting by the fire, day after day, is how I make my living. I am a cottage industry, and a good one. People fight over my drawings, wooden spoons, clay goddesses, and so on. My objects sell themselves. All I have to do is sit by the fire and make them.

Isn't it odd that I can see the room, the dress, the dogs, but the nature of the task remains vague? What never changes, though, what is always clear and compelling is the golden lamplight, and the look of serenity on my face.

I think I know what the fantasy is about, and what makes it so potent: it is about creativity without crisis, art without angst. It is about making beautiful things while feeling reasonably relaxed. It is something I would dearly love to achieve some day.

Putting The Garden To Bed

I'm glad I live in a place with four distinct seasons. It suits my temperament, which thrives on change and variety. Here in Vermont, no sooner do I fall prey to serious cabin fever than spring arrives. No sooner do I run out of vegetables in the freezer than the garden goes into production. No sooner do I get sick of looking at the garden in decline than it's time to call it quits for the year.

That's what I did this afternoon. I pulled up all the frozen bean plants (we'd have had a bumper crop, if only I'd planted them a week earlier) and fed them to the chickens. I pulled up the broccoli and fed it to the goats. The tomatoes, eggplants and peppers had been reduced to twigs by the recent frosts, but I threw them over the fence into the goat yard anyway—they'll give the babies something to play with. The ground under the Sungold tomatoes (the only plants that produced significantly this year) was covered with green fruit, which I carefully gathered for the chickens.

Then my husband dumped cartloads of lovely hay-cum-manure from the goat house on the garden, and I spread it carefully until each bed was covered in a couple of feet of the stuff. When I was done, the garden was slumbering under a fluffy, slightly smelly duvet of compost that will quietly work its magic in the coming frozen months.

“Good night,” I said to the garden, “sleep well. See you in the spring.” And I went into the house. The 2009 gardening season was officially over. Time to turn my mind to the wood stove and to the drawing table.

Of course the gardening season is not really over. The Swiss chard is still going strong, as is the kale. I still have to dig the potatoes, and bring in the rosemary, and harvest the sage, the oregano and the thyme.

But I like to think that it's over.

The Milkmaid's Report

After the milk-dumping episode, I couldn't stop thinking about ways to fix the situation with Blossom. I decided to milk her three times a day to get her used to the process. That didn't work, however—she was fine on the milking stand at noon and in the evening, but gave only a tablespoon of milk each time, since the babies had been nursing. In the morning, she turned into the milking monster I described in my earlier post.

My practical-minded husband viewed this as another in the long list of goat challenges I have asked him to solve over the years. (Some challenges he has solved: installing a sliding lock so the goats can't get into the chicken house; hanging the mineral feeder so the goats can't knock it over, and so on.) He immediately came up with a system of hobbles (using old belts) that would keep Blossom's hind legs on the floor of the milking stand. But I didn't want Blossom to stand for milking because she had to. I wanted her to stand because she wanted to.

mrb suggested in a comment that Blossom was upset because she'd been separated from her babies during the night, and I agreed. The “energy” in the goat house in the mornings was frantic, with the babies squeaking for Blossom and Virginia Slim (since they nurse both of them) and the two grown goats screaming because they wanted to get to the babies.

Last night, I didn't separate the babies from the big goats. When I checked on them before going to bed, they were all snuggled together against the cold, a peaceful scene. This morning, before light, I went out with my milk pail and put the just-awakened Blossom on the stand. Surprise! She stood there and ate grain, and let me milk her without a peep or a kick. Her udder wasn't quite as full as if I'd taken the babies away at night, but they don't nurse much in the dark, so I got a respectable amount of milk.

The trick, then, is for me to get to the goats before they wake up—but that, given Bisou's need for a bathroom break in the wee hours, should not be a problem.

Staying awake the rest of the day is another story.

Slippery Slope?

Saturday afternoon, we will clean out the goat shed. Since I only keep a couple of goats, I use the “bedding pack” method of stall maintenance. That means that I clean out the stall twice a year—spring and fall—and in between let the hay and manure accumulate. The mixture composts nicely and keeps the animals warm, and goats waste enough hay, even the very best hay, that there is always a layer of clean, dry stuff for them to walk and lie on.

In my early thirties, during spring break at the college where I taught, I used to clean out the goat shed by myself, shoveling out the layers of bedding and carting them in the wheelbarrow to the garden. One bright spring day I counted 72 wheelbarrow loads. Cleaning out the goat shed used to make me happy. I found it infinitely preferable to grading exams.

Now, in our Vermont homestead, the goat shed is farther from the garden, the ground is muddier, and I am no longer in my thirties. The cleaning of the goat shed has become a conjugal enterprise: my husband hooks up a garden cart to the riding mower, parks it in front of the shed, and I shovel forkfuls of bedding into it. He drives off, dumps it, and I fill the cart again. It takes about two hours, and the work is hard. Near the bottom, the bedding is wet and compacted, and it's a real effort to lift forkful after forkful of the stuff.

Now that the non-stop rains have eased, I want to get the shed cleaned out before the serious cold sets in and the old bedding freezes to the floor of the stall.

However, the combination of new puppy, new goat kids, and obstreperous milker has sapped my strength. So I have hired a young man to do the shoveling while my husband does the carting. I don't know what I'll do meanwhile—keep the goats from jumping on the tractor? Sit in the house and sew?

I need to save my energies for taming Blossom and training Bisou; the young man needs a job. So what's wrong with this scenario? What is wrong is that I feel that things are slipping out of my hands. Today it's help with mucking out; tomorrow—who knows? I have always believed that I should only keep what animals I can take care of (mostly) by myself. Yet recently I've found myself asking more and more often for help.

For example, Wolfie is feeling neglected because of the puppy, and badly needs exercise. One way to take care of this is to throw balls for him, but the milking struggles with Blossom have aggravated a shoulder injury (from lugging water buckets) that makes my entire left arm hurt. So I have to ask my husband to do the ball throwing for me.

The temperature is going down to the 20s tonight, and my big rosemary bush is sitting outside in its big pot. I tried to lift it but my arm rebelled. I'll have to ask for help with that, and with the two pots of scented geraniums as well.

I don't like this. I've always been a proponent of the “use it or lose it” philosophy, and now here I am, not even mucking out my own goat shed. I feel more and more like Marie Antoinette in her Petit Trianon, milking cows into Sevres porcelain bowls and letting the peasants do the real work.

Where, exactly, is the balance between masochism and self-indulgence? Will somebody please tell me that?

Confessions Of A Milkmaid

At first I thought I would keep the events of this morning to myself, but I've read too many pop psychology books not to know that unpleasant things will fester if they're hidden. And as a recovering Catholic, I have retained a belief in the salutary effects of confession. So here goes.

It is customary in goat circles to separate the babies from the mother at night a couple of weeks after birth. In the morning, the goatherd feeds the babies from a bottle—which results in goats who love people—then milks the mother and reunites the family.

Last night, I separated the babies from Blossom for the first time. First thing this morning I warmed a bottle of milk and picked the kids up one at a time and fed them. Then I put Blossom on the milking stand.

This was not the first time I'd milked her. We'd had short practice sessions since she'd given birth, and though she had started out compliant, she had become more and more rebellious. But this morning she reached new heights of obnoxiousness. She bucked, she kicked, she yelled—all the while swallowing great mouthfuls of grain. The minute I slid the milk pail under her, she sat down, by which I mean that she lowered her hind quarters and put her entire udder inside the pail. This made it impossible for me to get my hands around the teats.

I was quite calm at first. I sang my usual milking ditty—a Spanish folksong about shepherds leading their herds down from their summer pastures. I tried to speak soothingly. But it's hard to speak soothingly while wrestling with a small but amazingly strong goat.

Every once in a while I'd be able to squeeze some milk into the pail. I tried holding one of Blossom's hind legs up in the air and milking one-handed, but that put me in a contorted position that I couldn't maintain for long. And the whole time Blossom yelled and screamed. I know you're thinking “edema,” or “mastitis.” But no, her udder was not hard or hot or swollen. She was just being contrary.

With every squirt I managed to get from her, milk spilled onto my hands and clothes. I gave both of us a break, dried myself off, breathed deeply, and tried again, but when I slid the pail under her, she kicked it out of my hands.

And that, Reader, is when I lost it. I picked up the milking pail and...emptied its contents on top of Blossom.

This of course left me feeling terribly foolish, and with some cleaning up to do: the goat, the milking stand, the floor.

I spent the rest of the morning mulling over the situation. I have dealt with a few recalcitrant milkers in my time, but I've never been beaten by one. And this morning Blossom beat me.

I decided that I would milk her three times a day. I would use a small stainless steel bowl instead of the big milk pail. I would ground and center myself and breathe deeply and say a short prayer to the goat gods. I would expect whatever milk I got to be useless for human consumption, as a result of having been stepped in—in other words, I would not attach to outcomes.

And so I went out at noon, and again this evening, and centered myself and brushed Blossom and petted her and sang to her and did not attach to outcomes. Which was good, because there were none—she refused to let her milk down. But at least she was a little calmer, and so was I.

Tomorrow morning, as soon as I open my eyes, I will sally forth once more to confront my goat. I will be calm, I will be understanding, I will not attach to outcomes. And I will not get my feelings hurt if she kicks the pail again.

Petting Zoo

The still-unnamed baby goats were born two weeks ago today, and since then hardly a day has gone by without someone coming over to meet them, and the puppy Bisou.

Women have come, and children, and grown men too. The ritual is as follows: I usher them into the garage, through the tiny door (watch your head!) into the milking room, and into the goat sanctuary. I bend down and pick up the babies and hand one to each visitor.

The goat kids are used to this, and only thrash and bleat if the visitor neglects to support their hind quarters. Otherwise they sit quietly in the (to them) stranger's arms, grunting softly and smelling of hay. The humans' reaction is more intense, and pretty much identical across genders and ages: people coo and moan and speak in high-pitched voices, and bury their noses in the soft fur. They stand there and hold those babies against their chest and get a far-away look in their eyes. You can tell that something deep in their DNA is being addressed by those little goats.

When they recover I lead them out and bring Bisou to meet them, and the same scenario, with minor variations, ensues. The variations are due to Bisou's being way more wiggly than the goats, and her lack of hesitation to lick people's faces and bite their fingers with her needle teeth. So she gets put down more quickly. But the talk and the voice tones with which she is addressed are essentially the same.

After the animal babies are put away, my friends thank me for letting them come. “We're so glad you're doing this,” they say, “so we can enjoy it. It must be a lot of work!”

And it is.