Growing your own, berries to chicks

MONKTON  Surrounded recently by some of her 17 free-ranging chickens, Kathy Boyer knelt to feed them corn and introduce each by name.

Boyer, 44, and her husband, Rob Hunter, 45, live behind Boyer’s Orchard where she grew up. On one acre, they tend robust vegetable and flower gardens and berry patches, cultivate log-grown mushrooms, keep chickens for both eggs and meat and, in past years, have raised pigs and goats.

In addition to growing a significant portion of their food, they each have full-time jobs: Hunter is executive director of the nonprofit Frog Hollow Craft Association and Boyer is a horticulturist, landscaper and floral designer.

Hunter recounted how the whole thing began: he came home from a work trip in 2009 to find 15 chicks in the bath tub. “While I was away, Kathy had bought chickens,” he said with grin.

The couple call their Chicken Hill Gardens a “self-sustainability project” and hadn’t even heard of the term homesteading when they started.

“This is something we do because we want to know what’s going into our bodies,” Hunter said.

“We’re kind of a fluffy homestead,” Boyer continued somewhat sheepishly, gesturing to her feathered flock. “These are mostly retired. They’re in henopause,” she said. “We also call ourselves a retirement chicken community.”

Boyer and Hunter are examples of one type of homesteader, shifting gears mid-life to re-balance priorities and become more self-sufficient. On the spectrum of homesteading, they would not be considered hardcore, as Boyer noted.

But there’s room for all, says Andrea Chesman, a prolific cookbook author who lives in Ripton and has raised and preserved much of her family’s food for over 20 years. Her latest book, "The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How," was published in August.

“A homesteader is someone working towards independence in the food they consume and the energy they use,” Chesman said in a phone conversation. “Very few people are completely independent and self-sustaining.”

Cultural change

Chesman, 63, came to homesteading in the early 1980s after burning out on political activism following the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident. “I wanted to work for positive change,” she said. “Negative is too draining.”

“Back then it wasn’t so easy to find local, organic food,” Chesman said. “You had to grow your own.”

As Chesman built her reputation as a food preservation expert through the '80s and early '90s, she was asked to teach classes that would often be canceled due to lack of interest, she recalled.

That is no longer the case, Chesman said.

“There’s just been a change in the culture," she said. "There have been way too many threats to the safety of our food supply to make anyone confident in our industrial food system.”

Seeking resiliency

Thirty-three percent of attendees at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) annual winter conference earlier this year described themselves as gardeners/homesteaders, making them the largest group at the event, reports Rachel Fussell, NOFA-VT education coordinator.

“People are really interested in resiliency and creating their own little pocket for themselves, redefining what they can do for themselves and their families,” Fussell said.

Interest in homesteading topics at the conference and through the organization’s summer and fall workshop series has increased and expanded to subjects like herbalism, she noted.

“It’s not just about producing their own food but taking control of their own health,” Fussell said.

Frugal but not cheap

Typically, homesteaders work hard to minimize the resources they use, by necessity and by design.

“We try to do everything in the most frugal manner possible,” explained Hunter of Chicken Hill Gardens, pointing out an A-frame chicken coop found through the local Front Porch Forum.

The couple found roof shingles for animal shelter structures on the side of the road and made fencing from re-purposed palettes anchored with cedar posts cut from their property. They soak their mushroom logs in an old (unused) cement septic tank that doubles as a “water feature” in their ornamental garden.

Three basement chest freezers overflow with their own meat and vegetables and fruits, including this summer’s bumper raspberry crop.

“But we don’t have a root cellar,” Boyer noted, to store onions, garlic and root vegetables.

“We do have a very cold guest room,” her husband said.

Even so, they chuckle ruefully when people assume they’re doing all this work to save money. “It’s actually kind of discouraging to try to keep track,” Boyer said. “We feed all organic grain. It’s not about saving money. I’m just trying not to lose money.”

“It’s a quality of life thing,” her husband said.

Limits

With quality of life in mind, Boyer and Hunter took a step back after 2014, during which they raised four pigs, three goats, and more than 60 meat birds.

“I felt overwhelmed last year,” Boyer admitted. “We were also succession-planting (in the garden) and producing mounds of stuff. It was all over the counter waiting to be frozen or canned.”

“We wanted to have a life, too,” Hunter said.

This year, they cut way back on meat production, raising only a dozen or so birds. The couple has made time to hike sections of the Long Trail throughout the summer and fall.

But, Boyer said, “I missed the pigs and goats.”

They’ve already booked a fall 2016 pig slaughter date.

Mutual support

Boyer and Hunter do research watching Internet videos and read a lot. “There’s always an Eliot Coleman book by the bed,” Hunter said, referring to the four-season, cold-climate gardening guru from Maine.

They’ve also learned from, and trade with, fellow homesteaders, particularly Monkton neighbors Melanie Cote and Warren Dixon.

Cote, 42, and Dixon, 39, milk goats, raise meat and laying ducks; sugar and keep bees; grow all their vegetables, mushrooms and some fruit; and fuel a wood-fired furnace at their 30-acre Meadowhawk Homestead.

Cote and Dixon have taken advantage of various NOFA-VT and CVU Access workshops.

Although, while navigating recently through piles of neatly stacked firewood, Dixon noted, “You can read and workshop all you want but, at some point, you’ve just got to do it.”

When they started about five years ago, Dixon, a holistic health practitioner and potter, shouldered the main homesteading responsibilities. Cote continued her career in middle school education, but often milked goats at 5:30 a.m. before heading to school.

“I could almost swing it, but couldn’t do it all by myself,” Dixon said.

The pair learned what author and homesteader Andrea Chesman noted: “It is a lot of work and it really helps to have a partner as committed as you.”

Two years ago, Cote joined her husband full-time on the homestead. She also teaches yoga and runs a home organizing business. In addition, Dixon sells pottery and the couple hosts farm stay guests.

Cote and Dixon note that they were financially stable enough to invest in a foreclosed property with acreage and then to give up Cote’s steady paycheck and benefits a few years later.

“I never thought I’d be doing this,” Cote said. “It’s all about being able to live a peaceful life, to create for ourselves and not be consumeristic.”

Legacy

Green Mountain College professor Philip Ackerman-Leist, 52, has been involved in homesteading for close to two decades as a practitioner and teacher. In his book, "Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader" (Chelsea Green, 2010), he describes how he and his wife, Erin, established themselves on their Pawlet homestead, building an off-grid home using local lumber and raising their own grass-fed meat, dairy and vegetables.

“I’m not sure who coined the phrase the simple life, but I wish it were one that we could buck,” Ackerman-Leist writes. “Homesteading is quite the opposite. It’s far from simple.”

“It’s a trajectory, everybody moving along on their own chronology,” he elaborated over the phone. “It’s more of an aspiration, always tempered by the realities.”

The couple’s three children —  now 6, 10 and 13 — tempered their reality, he said, requiring more time and energy, both their own and the fuel-powered kind.

“Homeschooling and homesteading on one hand are beautifully complementary,” he said, “but they also compete.”

Despite some concessions, the young Ackerman-Leists are experiencing a far different childhood than many of their father’s students who, he observed, often seem to be fleeing their suburban roots.

“They’re bored,” he said, “and looking for discipline and meaning.”

In his travels to speak and teach, Ackerman-Leist has noticed broadening interest in homesteading, not just in Vermont, “where it’s in the air,” and not just among the young and idealistic.

At his parents’ retirement community in North Carolina, he was pleasantly surprised at the “real excitement” in learning more.

For the elders, Ackerman-Leist said, “it’s as much a legacy focus, the world they’re leaving for their grandkids.”

Contact Melissa Pasanen at mpasanen@aol.com or follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TasteofVermont.

Events and more information

Book events/food demonstrations with  Andrea Chesman, whose new book is "The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How" (Storey Publishing)

7 p.m. Oct. 21, Lincoln Library in Lincoln

2 p.m. Oct. 24, Phoenix Books Essex

Five tips for exploring self-sustainability:

• Plan a garden for next summer.
• If considering animals, “chickens are the gateway animal.”
• Identify maple trees on property and try backyard sugaring next spring.
• Scout for old apple trees on your property or in your neighborhood
• Think about what you might have to barter with others.
• Source: Author Andrea Chesman