The Circle Of Life

That's the name of my article that is nominated for an Atlantic Journalism Award, to be given out this weekend in Fredericton.
I finally found a link to the article:

http://ajasonline.org//resources/uploads/538-1328048522-299557.pdf

In Conversation With...Louise Haycocks and Kirsteen Thomson

First published in the April 11 issue of The Oxford Journal by Sara Mattinson.

“Um, why does this cow have Christmas lights strung around its head?” I ask. 

Louise Haycocks strides to the other side of the pine tree where I’m standing next to the cow shed. 

“What? Oh!” she exclaims. “He’s out of the pen. Sir Loin!”

Five minutes later, with the help of two dwarf goats, one small dog and a three-legged cat, Louise has Sir Loin, a large bull calf, back in the pen with his mother, an Irish Dexter cow named Buttercup. Louise and her partner, Kirsteen Thompson, live outside of Pugwash on Round House Eco Farm (so named because their house is octagonal). Their building plan was inspired by a 16-sided house in Devon, England, where they used to live. 

“What brought you to Canada?” I ask.

“An aeroplane,” Louise replies (so I write the word as it sounds with her British accent). 

“I’ll be the sensible one,” states Kirsteen, who was born and raised in Canada; she met Louise in Nigeria where they were both volunteering with Cuso International, a non-profit development organization. Kirsteen joined Louise back in England.  

“We lived in the countryside,” Kirsteen explains, “but the countryside there is very different; it’s quite crowded.”

So they landed in Quebec and bought a camping trailer to begin looking for land in northern New Brunswick. Their search ended, finally, in October just outside of Westchester, where they found a little cabin for sale and spent their first winter making plans. 

“It was the end of the line,” Louise quips and Kirsteen adds, “We wanted to live by the sea, for some obscure reason.” (They had cycled together through Nova Scotia 10 years earlier and Louise had been quite taken by the name ‘Pugwash’.)

It was the apple trees that attracted them to the nine-acre property on Miller Road.

“When you’re looking for land, you have to find something that speaks to you, that you like,” Kirsteen says.

“It has to speak to both of you,” Louise interjects.

They now own 20 acres because along with the cows and goats, they keep three horses and a pony, a pig which produces piglets every spring, and a large flock of chickens that includes a peacock. Like most modern farmers, in order to support the farm, Louise and Kirsteen have off-farm jobs (in adult education and educational technology).

“It’s not a hobby farm because we do have some income,” Kirsteen explains, “but it’s how we like to spend our money. Partly we do it because we want to eat food that we know where it came from. That’s how we started. Pigs and chickens are raised in such terrible conditions that we won’t eat them. We raise chickens, turkeys, pigs, eggs, of course, plus one calf a year which is our beef.” 

Hence the aptly named Sir Loin who was decorating himself with lights from a small tree in the middle of their circular driveway as this interview was taking place. 

They don’t do their own butchering; they are quite pleased with a local butcher who takes care of their provincially-inspected pork, which is the product they sell. 

“We don’t have a problem with killing the animals,” says Louise, “it’s just that the butchers know what they are doing. I can’t imagine where we’d start! It’s not about us doing everything ourselves. It’s never been about that. It’s about knowing what we were eating. It’s about the food. And what we’ve discovered along the way is how much better the food tastes. But in the beginning, it was about the industrialization of animals.”

Do they get attached to their animals? 

“Well, not to the chickens,” Louise and Kirsteen answer at the same time.

“We had a wonderful boar but we had to butcher him because he was getting too big to breed younger sows,” says Kirsteen. “He was a wonderful pig. You’d scratch his belly and he’d roll over. He was the sweetest, most gentle boar you could imagine but he was too big. You can’t keep pigs as pets.”

“It’s not as difficult as you might think,” Louise says. “It becomes the only decision that is sensible. When we started, we realized how easy it is to become a collector of animals so we said that what we would try and do is for everything to have a use. Like the peacock,” she adds wryly. 

“He’s alright,” says Kirsteen in Pointless Percy’s defence, who came to Round House Eco Farm a year ago as a rescue. 

It’s not just their own meat they enjoy. Thanks to their gardens, they freeze vegetables to eat throughout the winter. 

“We spend very little at the grocery store,” Louise admits. 

Less than $100 a month.

“But I put store-bought cream into my coffee,” I point out.

“Only because the cow went dry earlier than we expected this year,” Louise answers and I’m disappointed to miss out on the opportunity to taste Buttercup’s other contribution to the couple’s self-described obsession with good food.

For that is what Kirsteen identifies as the most satisfying part of this life: the food. 

“We made our own bacon the other day, we smoked our own bacon, and it was so good. When you have a meal and everything is from your own land, it’s wonderful.”

Photo: Louise and Kirsteen check on Priscilla and her two-day old piglets (there are 8 of them). 

Stop the presses!

Well, it's not that dramatic (although we did have a moment like that a couple of weeks ago with our diligent co-op student, Emily) but we are a bigger paper this week. We've had to go to 28 pages in order to fit in all the colour ads that are scheduled. That's great for a weekly community newspaper. Shows we are still alive and kicking hard despite the conglomerates trying to eat us for lunch AND dinner.
Community newspapers matter. This week's issue is proof.

Rain, Rain, Come Our Way

Here that gasping, those gulping sounds?
That's the sound of our dry Earth soaking up the rain.

We are precipitation-challenged this year. In March, we received half of our normal amount of precipitation, and April is on track for the same kind of numbers. The tulips planted in the large boxes in front of the chicken coop aren't coming on very well; too parched. If they don't bloom, I'll miss seeing that splash of colour. I've been worried about the spring peeper tadpoles, too; they need water in order to grow or there won't be any peepers next spring.
How would we know it was spring if the spring peepers don't call?
Yet, as I recall, it rained non-stop for ten days in early May last year so with Maritime weather, it's always "Be careful what you wish for!"

Winning Neighbour

The East Coast Music Awards were held last weekend in Moncton, NB, and two of our neighbours were nominated. 
Dale Murray, along with his partner in life and music, moved into our neighbourhood over a year ago, choosing to settle in the country in order to continuing pursuing their work. Dale is a singer/songwriter, formerly with The Guthries and Cuff the Duke but now a solo artist (he released his latest album, Dream Mountain Dream, in March) as well as a music producer. Christina Martin is a singer/songerwriter who new album gets released this summer. She was nominated for Folk Recording of the Year for her last album, House Concert, recorded at their new home studio in Port Howe about six months after they moved in.
It was Dale, however, who brought home the hardware. He is the ECMA Audio Professional of the Year for his work in music production.

Nobody Here But Us Chickens

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, April. 4, 2012, by Sara Mattinson.

During a recent conversation, I mentioned my chickens and the woman I was talking to exclaimed, “You have chickens?!” the same way I would say, “You won a million dollars?!” Yet I understand her excitement because for some of us, chickens represent a certain kind of achievement. 

Back in the summer of 2006, when I was spending a few weeks alone at the summer house my parents used to own on Pugwash Point, I opened up a book of writing exercises by author Julia Cameron. In her introduction to the second exercise, Cameron wrote, “Each of us has a different idea of sophistication. Each of us has certain items that speak to us as tokens of success....List twenty-five things that represent to you sophistication and success.”

By the time I’d reached number 12 on my list, I realized I had it all wrong. I drew a line through tuxedo and champagne and a trip to Italy then wrote, “A chicken coop in the back yard.” To me, keeping chickens would mean I’d reached a level of success that allowed me to have a home in the country. A few weeks later, I started dating a local boy and the first time I saw his rural acreage, I said, “What a great place for a chicken coop.” 

When he replied, “I would love to have chickens,” I knew we would have beautiful eggs together.

Some scientists believe the domestic chicken dates as far back as 10,000 years. There are 19 billion domestic chickens in the world. A free-range hen can lay 160 eggs in her first year of laying. The expression “raising your hackles” refers to the long, flowing hackle feathers on the back of a rooster’s neck which he raises in order to make himself look larger. The fear of chickens is called “alektoraphobia”.   

It was fear of the big feet and swishing tails of horses and cows that made me fulfill an adult-onset hankering for livestock with chickens. For a city-raised girl, seven-pound hens were the perfect way to introduce me to animal husbandry. A year after we married in 2007, we built a chicken coop, painted it yellow, and filled it with a dozen chickens which is a nice size for a back yard flock. Today, the only remaining member of that original flock is our large but good-natured rooster who turns four this spring. 

 “How much do you think that rooster of yours would dress?” my father-in-law asked me. 

I pinned a beady chicken eye on the former farmer and replied, “I hope you mean dressing him up in a tuxedo because that’s the only way he’s coming to dinner.”  

Wouldn’t that be sophisticated? 

The woman who was excited to learn I keep chickens recently moved here from Halifax and I’m sure if she saw me walking across the yard in my rubber boots to collect warm, brown eggs from under the dozen hens who live in our yellow chicken coop, she would be envious of my sophistication and success. 

A Winning Neighbour!

Check out this week's issue of The Oxford Journal for an interview with singer/songwriter and producer Dale Murray, of Port Howe, fresh off his win at this weekend's East Coast Music Awards in Moncton.