Summerdale Smallholding

Recently, while searching for information about raising pigs, I discovered a British term that I really appreciate. Admittedly, I get a bit romantic about the Continent, the Isles included, and, even though I’ve never visited (except on Google Earth) and have no real knowledge on which to base such an opinion, I just sort of assume everything is more idyllic there. Pastoral images of English cottage gardens, Italian vineyards, and rural French countryside definitely resonate with me. A subtle formality can be found in the European rustic form that I feel is missing in most American landscapes. It makes me think ‘that’s the way things ought to look.’ So I’m not at all surprised by my reaction to the term smallholding.

Loosely defined, a smallholding is a small, single family farm designed to provide for and sustain its inhabitants, which is exactly what we are looking to accomplish with our new property. Not agriculture, per se, just us husbanding our little corner of the earth and maybe taking a few links out of our food chain. A process more so than a product, perhaps, but hopefully one that also generates some tangible benefits for the effort.


In keeping with the fine tradition of our good friend Thoreau, I feel inclined to document the entire enterprise, and since this be the medium of our times it seems as good a place as any to do so. Expect to see many more discussions, plans, solicitations of assistance, pictures, updates, trials and errors of this nature in posts to come. Sanctimonious non sequitur will continue to be a mainstay, alongside a running narrative on our smallholding activity.

Obviously, it is quite unlikely that we will ever see any real return on our investment, other than those abstruse benefits reaped from living a pastoral existence. Not even considering capital assets such as land, tractor and existent infrastructure, I doubt the operation could ever break even. But since the validity of that skepticism is something I am interested in substantiating, I will maintain a financial record using Google Docs and will share an other-than-quarterly report from time to time. Seeing as they are our only live stock at the moment, I’m split over whether I ought to include expenses related to the dogs. I tend to think not, though I may throw them in just because.

So far, the only cost has been $13.01 in diesel fuel. Bertha and I spent a day getting reacquainted while we peeled six inches of composted straw and manure from the area where the dog yard is going to be. Bertha has two left feet when I’m at the controls and she nearly foundered herself once when I led her into a particularly greasy patch of gumbo. She was definitely a little overaggressive moving the burn barrel, which she squashed beneath her bucket like an elephant might flatten a cockroach with its trunk. In the end, however, the trapezoid of ground laid out as the dog yard was scraped mostly clean and heaps of rotted straw and manure covered a majority of the proposed garden plot.

I’m not sure what to do about the garden. It needs to be plowed or tilled or all of the above. As with most of my opinions on the matter, I’m inclined toward an animal powered solution, especially since the area in question isn’t really big enough to warrant the acquisition of tractor implements. Currently, I am partial to the idea of getting a couple of pigs next spring and just letting them root up the place. It would mean we’d be forced to wait a season before we could plant, but on the other hand we’d have our own pork and we wouldn’t have to buy a plow or tiller. I haven’t a clue really but I’m banking on the assumption that pigs would break things down to a point that they would be hand-tillable afterwards, which may or may not be the case.

In that same vein, I’m divided as to whether a permanent chicken coop or an ark is a better bet. I’d rather avoid store-bought feed; the most organic, fundamental solution is what I’m after. And I don’t mean ad campaign organic either. I’m referring to the unadulterated interpretation of the word: of developing in a manner analogous to the natural growth and evolution characteristic of living organisms; arising as a natural outgrowth. Basically I’d like to see all the farm animals on the Summerdale smallholding subsisted strictly from the fodder at hand, and even though I realize that is highly unrealistic, I still think it a worthwhile goal.

As well, there is the question of weed control. We have a proliferation of thistle in our little pasture out front and the corral around the barn is thick with some kind of insidious invader. I immediately thought of sheep or goats, but research and nagging fear of the inevitable Siberian on sheep encounter makes me wary. In the end we’ll probably get some anyway, if not for any useful purpose then just for the fun of having them around, for a little while at least.

Betty's Isis of Bydog

In the meantime, I have been plenty occupied with our, or as Brandi puts it, MY new puppy. A lot of the motivation to buy a house out of town was born from our desire to greatly expand our kennel, and we wasted no time getting started along that path. I have been searching far and wide for a female Siberian pup with features similar to Kona and Blue, and I finally gave into temptation and bought a dog from a breeder in North Carolina that appeared, at least in pictures, to exhibit many of the same attributes.



Blue and Kona



Tensaw in repose

Now that she has arrived, I can see that Isis tends to be a bit more characteristic of Tensaw and is missing some esoteric quality that the other girls possess. It seems her coat is smoother, like Tenny's.  If nothing else, she certainly shares his gift for song, a fact she is quite willing to demonstrate.

Our other objective with the kennel was to acquire a command leader from a proven bloodline that could guide our green dogs and get us started toward building a real sled team. In particular, I was interested in Anadyr dogs, as I had helped handle the purebred Siberian team of J.P. Norris at the Tok Race of Champions and I knew the quality of his line. After months of detective work, Brandi sleuthed out a sled dog operation in Pray, Montana, called Absaroka Dogsled Treks who, as luck would have it, had a command leader and an Anadyr brood bitch they were willing to offer us. Our plan is to travel east early next month to check out these dogs and hopefully acquire what would be an exceptional foundation to our kennel.

aerial view with planned improvements

Before we can do that, however, there is the little matter of fencing the dog yard. I called Ken at Bitterroot Fence and made tentative arrangements for his crew to set posts some time early next week, but with four inches of fresh snow and the truck thermometer reading 6 degrees when I left the house this morning I would not be surprised to hear that they were running somewhat behind schedule. Ah, the glory that is winter in Montana!

the Homestead

Funny how things come back around.  You see it in fashion all the time.  Children grow up, become consumers, and their collective buying power forces the revival of whatever stylistic elements were in vogue when they were young.  I saw a kid at the post office and couldn't help wondering if he knew he had raided the wardrobe of a John Hughes film.  I’m sure the girls will start pegging the legs of their jeans any day now.  I’ve even heard that mullets and cheesy mustaches are on their way back.

When I first arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, my brother Jeb sent me an email informing me that our Great-grandfather Spencer (my mother’s mother’s father) once had a ranch here.  The story is he also had a hunting cabin up the Rattlesnake north of Missoula.  Later the family moved to Southern California because they thought the climate there would be better for the children's asthma. Jeb suggested I go hunt up the old homestead in the Ravalli county records.  I figured I could do one better.

Skip ahead three generations, and history repeats itself.

You can’t really call it a ranch, since it is much too small and has no livestock.  Yet.

But there will be.  My hope is for a Holstein heifer, a few sheep, a handful of chickens, and possibly a pig.  Brandi is leaning toward goats and a wee donkey.

Regardless of what shape the hoofed residents take, there will definitely be more of these.  The latest addition, our new puppy Isis, arrives today.

The thistle crop in the front pasture isn't very pretty but we enjoy the rest of the view.

Bertha likes hers too.

 

                Reverse angle.

Now pull back

It's not the old Spencer place, but it will do.

We're gonna put the dog kennel here.  Bertha and I will be plenty busy this weekend peeling back that layer of compost and moving it to the garden.

Looking east toward the Big Ditch.  Gravity flow sprinklers irrigate the pasture on Kona's side of the fence.

We know it will be tons of work but we love our little spread.

a New New Deal

Stuff has been happening at a breakneck pace. It’s already two weeks into hunting season and I’ve been out exactly once. I just bought tickets for the Banff Mountain Film Festival’s annual World Tour stop at the UM Theatre. Halloween is gone and Thanksgiving is looming. Snow is an almost permanent feature in the sweeping panorama that now greets us every time we turn our eyes west.

We have moved into our new home on Summerdale Road. Stress that had been building throughout the cumbersome process of purchasing the foreclosed home from Fannie Mae culminated in a mad dash snatch and grab mission to Lincoln County for the tractor. It was done in classic Pintok fashion. In, out, down to Corvallis, and back to Missoula in less than 24 hours. The high cost of renting a trailer meant that I had little time to spare.

Fortunate for a trailering rookie like me, all went remarkably well, meaning no major catastrophes, unlike the infinitely less dangerous undertaking of picking up our trash bin from the alley behind the old place, which cost the truck a rear bumper and quarter panel.  I did have to get a little NASCAR in the pits when a sheet metal screw flattened my front tire at the gas-n-go outside of Noxon.  No thanks to the trailer aficionado who talked me up through the entire tire change without lending a hand, I still made the cabin and had the tractor loaded by the time night fell, which was my goal. I even got the binders on her right in only two tries. Properly securing a heavy load like our old Ford tractor is paramount to trailering success, and seeing as it is something I had never done before I felt pretty good to have the job all wrapped up by the time my brother Calen arrived to visit me.

Calen lives full time in the home country, working as a surveyor. Money there is scarce and, financially speaking, he could probably do better if he took his skills elsewhere, like when he moved to Texas and went corporate. But a poor day in heaven is still better than a good day in hell, so he prefers eking out his existence in the nicest place no one can afford to live, cultivating cynicism with the rest of the valley’s economically woeful population.

Its tough being destitute in the most affluent country on earth, and living so encourages a certain mocking contempt for the Haves amongst the Have-Nots. The biggest Have of all, everyone knows, is the government, and in no place is this as evident as this place. The only people with a steady income are the teachers, road maintenance workers, postmen, Forest Service employees, and the contractors working for the Superfund operation in Libby.

Once, industry here was extraction. Resources were hacked and pulled from the land in dirty, ugly, bottom line motivated ways. Now those resources are gone, played out or no longer profitable. Only their messes remain.

The biggest offender in the area, at least the one recognized as such by the US Environmental Protection Agency, is the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine outside of Libby. Around the turn of the century, high incidences of lung-related illness and death in and around Libby gave experts cause to investigate, and lingering health concerns bequeathed the site with Superfund status. A clean up operation is on-going, to the tune of some $500 million dollars.

“They spent three hundred thousand dollars cleaning up the Rod and Gun club,” Calen tells me. “Said the whole place was full of vermiculite. Found it six feet deep in the ground.

“Hell, that place isn’t even worth three hundred thousand. They say that it’s a good thing, that it stimulates the local economy, but it doesn’t. Give me three hundred thousand dollars and I’ll clean that place up. I’d burn it to the ground, build a new one. Put a dozen people to work.

“Paying to clean up a trailer park? I mean, c’mon. I’d burn all that, build some nice apartment building that’s energy efficient with sustainable blah blah blah. Tell the people, you want some place to live? I’ll give you a place to live, hell, I’ll pay you to build it, but I’m not gonna waste a bunch of money cleaning up a trailer park. I’d just tell ‘em, you can’t clean up a trailer. There’s no more of that in this valley.

“So they’re gonna dig up all the ground out at the Rod and Gun. I’m like, what? To do what with it? Haul it someplace else? It’s six feet underground, for Pete’s sake. I mean, where do they think the stuff comes from in the first place? What, are they mining vermiculite?”

I’m paraphrasing here, but I was laughing so hard at the time that it’s difficult to quote him exactly. His scorn was sincere but so was his rationale. It echoed a theme I had been pondering earlier that day on the drive up there.

Government can’t create jobs, only private entrepreneurs can, I heard some politico say on NPR. Maybe, if we’re talking about random nonessential niceties. But massive, capital shifting changes in the paradigm? Only government has the horsepower to motivate that kind of thing.

As Calen points out, they say that they’re trying to stimulate the economy, but they’re not. A cursory survey of economic history demonstrates that America only prospers when we’re changing, when there is an ushering of a new era. If the government really wanted to encourage things, they would rouse the slumbering beast of transformation. They would lead us from the desert to the watering hole.

We need a new New Deal. We need a new Industrial Revolution. We need to begin construction on the next incarnation of transcontinental railroad or interstate highway system. We need to embrace the prospect of progress, the challenge of change. Because it is when this country is moving forward that the world is at its best.