Friday, October 28, 2016

October: Family visit, duck and guinea pig deaths, theft, a birthday and our tortoise returns


Eug's mom and brother were visiting for October, so we were poised to show them how awesome homesteading is. Except.

The university protests got more intense, and university more or less closed for the year (I'm still working). Totally unrelatedly, some crows started picking off our ducklings, one by one. We went from 17 to 13 ducklings in about 24 hours, at which time we realised what was happening and put away all the ducklings (8 in our house, 5 with their mom in a small chicken coop). Eug had to quickly build a greenhouse especially for ducklings. There are thirteen ducklings sleeping in our bathroom as I write this. Then one of our guinea pigs died. Our other guinea pig is lonely, and we found ourselves on the lookout for a female friend for her.

We also had to give up on 17 unhatched eggs that a duck has been sitting on for over 40 days (muscovies sit for 33-35 days). The mother duck was sad and furious, and we were sad with her-- it seems the eggs got too hot and all stopped developing at around day 28-- so close. Duck raising business can be hard, not only because of the economics of it (2 months of food for mama duck!). Because the ducks seem to have real, intense mothering instincts and so we share their pain in some small way. We had to take the eggs away, because the mother was getting weak and we knew that it was too late for the eggs to hatch. The sorrow of some ducks can seem beside the point when universities are falling apart, when politicians are leaning towards fear and control... but to me ducks are not a distraction. Farming speaks to universals; what we're doing doesn't have all the answers, but trying to provide our own food somehow occupies us, and seems to provide us with new windows into our world.

In the middle of the month, we also had someone/some people come onto our property in the night (They were trying to get into our house, also) and steal a bunch of stuff from our verandah and car-- Eug's cell phone, my hat, Eug and my shoes, our fancy U.S.-metal-containers-and-bottles-from-when-I-had-more-energy-to-avoid-plastic, our ladder, our electrical extension cords, our hammer, our wire cutters. Enough stuff to add up to more than we feel comfortable running to a shop to replace. Which seems totally stupid, especially if you're reading this from the U.S., where between thrift stores and Amazon you could replace the stolen stuff pretty cheaply. The police kept promising to come but nobody ever did. It was the relatively precious stuff we use every day, which is why it was easily accessible I suppose. If we add all the stuff we've had stolen in the past 5 years, it ends up amounting to about one year of our regular expenses. Which somehow does (since I'm writing about it at length) and doesn't matter, because we have all needs met and a whole lot of luxuries. Anyway, we've bought a simple motion sensor alarm -- walking the line between being overly fearful and being responsible parents to our kids. And once we have some more fencing set up, we're going to get a couple of ferocious.... geese. I'm the South African, so a lot of times I feel responsible for our family being safe here, and guilty when I can't make that happen.

Oddly, at these kinds of junctures, I like to imagine I'm in one of these missionary autobiographies, where the barefoot doctor was almost running out of food or something equally terrible was happening, and then things turned around through prayer. I'm not that kind of prayerful person just yet, and some of those stories seem a little monochromatic and colonial now. Still, these were (surprisingly) stories of extraordinarily strong women, and what I get from memories of these stories was the possibility of being someone who doesn't freak out about stuff, and who can see a bigger picture. There's something supernaturally powerful to remaining hopeful and excited when there are opportunities for cynicism and anger to creep in-- something captured in the joyful, intentional naïveté of those old missionaries.

So here's to the hopeful growth this Spring, and to gratitude for another good month:
New duckling enclosure, to protect them from crows. A bit annoying because they're not learning to forage properly, but better than being eaten by crows...
Some of the almost-fully developed ducklings (skip the next picture if you're squeamish...-- Noah and I went through a couple of the eggs to make sure there was really no hope (and for Noah to have a sense of the process of growth and development), before taking them all away from their mama.
The angulate tortoise spends 5 minutes on our verandah before returning to the farm. We cross paths a couple of times a year-- I think the tortoise likes it that way. (well, ok, he'd probably be happy if we never crossed paths at all...)
Tortoise got royal treatment before being sent out for another year on the farm.
We decided to buy a sunstove (a solar oven)-- the one I made with the kids last year was fairly useless. This one came from a non-profit interested in giving durable, simple cooking solutions. It gets pretty hot! So far I made terrible bread and a lot of slow-cooked scraps for our ducks and chickens. Watch this space-- it'll get better once we learn how to integrate it into our daily lives.
Noah was able to cross the monkey bars for the first time this month. As some of you know, transitions can be tough for him and so we celebrated him coping with the change of schedule and lifestyle that came with the family visit.
Cold rainy day means ducklings drying off and pooping in the bath... Don't say anything about the condition of the bath.
The boys are all about snakes, all the time. Can you spot us? The teacher is not just texting-- she's playing the noise a puff adder makes to warn you. Terrifying but helpful.



Young chameleon!
Pregnant chameleon-- learned that Cape Dwarf Chameleons keep the eggs inside them until they're ready to hatch.  I'm really hoping to see tiny chameleons with the kids. Chameleons are one of many reasons I hope our neighbourhood stays a bit overgrown and wild-- chameleons can't survive crossing areas that are heavily manicured, and certainly can't cross roads. (that may be a passive aggressive reference to our being passively aggressively asked to clean up our weeds... hehe)
Hana considers her options at Camps Bay tidal pool.
Infinite rides on the wheelbarrow
Don't try to tell Hana you're tired of giving wheelbarrow rides...
Lonely guinea pig seeks friend. In the meantime gets a lot of love from Eli.
camps bay... 
The first year where we can let the boys swim alone...sortof.  
swinging high.
Onwards and upwards!

Saturday, October 1, 2016

September: Coffee, Ducky Duck, froglings, snakes, and working on the house

Eug's mom and brother are visiting for a month, so I expect the October update will be full of all kinds of adventures. Hopefully we'll make them feel comfortable on our farm (as compared to a high rise apartment in Seoul). For now... here are some things we were up to in September.

Coffee
This month I managed to find coffee plants for the first time in Cape Town. I've gotten green beans to germinate, but they never survived. We need 15-20 mature, happy, plants to be self-sufficient in coffee, so we'll not get there any time soon. Still, it's a fun experiment. Until we have a greenhouse (shadecloth, not glass, given our climate), we're limited by what will fit in our house. So far thats 2 small Arabica trees, and one Robusta. Robusta are probably better suited to our climate, but Arabica is supposedly a lot tastier. So maybe we'll do a mix of the two. The Robusta plants are also a lot cheaper...My faithful neighbourhood nursery has 1m trees for just R30 ($2) whereas the Arabicas, at another nursery, cost R90 each for much tinier plants ($6). I'm hoping to have 8 trees by the end of the year, but don't tell Eug that I'm planning to turn our tiny house into a coffee forest.

This month we had a lot of baby frogs in our reservoir, as well as lots of new growth and .... ducklings! I'm so excited about the ducklings-- just watching them run around is quite addictive (for Hana also), though it's clear we have a lot of learning to do: 

So, onto our ducklings...
Our first batch of ducklings included eight that the mother kept, as well as one egg that she abandoned. Mommy duck just brought the egg out from her nest and dumped it near our house, where we witnessed it hatching about 36 hours before all the others. The abandoned duckling immediately imprinted on us and became a full time job, with a tiny duck following us everywhere. This is an important moment to note that we don't have dogs or cats because we're not really sure we can handle the responsibility. Eli said "you and daddy can take care of Hana, Noah and me will take care of Ducky." Eug tried various things to get our duckling adopted by another adult duck, but no luck, the duckling was certain it is human. Eug drew the line when it desperately wanted to sleep on our pillow, nuzzled into my neck. The good news was that it ate a fair number of the flies in the kitchen/living room. [What we learned: we need to make a brooder so that if we have abandoned ducks, we have somewhere to put them straightaway.]

And then when I was out with the kids and Eug was working outside with Ducky with him, the mother came and throttled the duckling. Enough to really injure her, though we were hopeful and kept her close and held her a lot. She died in the night in Noah's bed, at just one week old. There was this clear moment when s/he crossed from farm animal to something else. It was somewhere between catching flies for her and her taking baths with the kids and squeaking if she couldn't see one of us. Then she was gone and it was weird because she was just a little one-week-old duckling, whose brothers and sisters we're still planning on eating (that's a contradiction for another day). And we are really, really sad. Noah especially. He wanted her to come back, and I wanted to tell him that it would be ok, but death is not like that. All that seemed to be left was an opportunity to be changed by that week of life and by the strange ways that family grows and is shaped unexpectedly. 

Our second batch of eggs included 10 babies that hatched, plus 3 unhatched eggs. There was some confusion on the part of the ducklings about where they belonged, which almost led to some duckling murders by first-time-mothers who didn't want to end up with ducklings that weren't theirs. For now, it seems ok. We hope.

The third batch included 17 eggs! They'll hatch out in a couple of weeks. We are ultimately going to eat these ducks as our primary source of meat, fully aware of the gravity and pain of doing so, and also fairly convicted that its appropriate. It's definitely easier to buy meat at the shops!

Protests for free education
In other news: Like last year, there are student protests (joined by some faculty) at UCT over fees and the call for free education. Like last year, I did not physically join in as I do not know how or when. For what it's worth, I stand beside the protestors in spirit and agree that there are many kinds of violence; that it is violence to be born poor in South Africa, and that there is absolutely nothing romantic or simple about it. And yet. Possibility and potential shouldn't be defined or reliant on government decisions, by state education. It is and so I stand beside the protestors in spirit, even as I wonder how to restore the centrality of farming...and generally learning to take care of a lot of menial tasks ourselves... convinced that rural life is legitimate and potentially wonderful.  

We've lived on our smallholding a year now and we're not doing a good job yet of sharing with others. Mainly, living next to a township is overwhelming-- in a way that it may not be for someone who isn't from this country-- where my privilege seems to swell directly from the experiences of my neighbours. Farming is really hard, and it would be a whole lot harder if we were depending on it for our livelihood. But it's also a way of gradually opting out of a lot of exploitative industries, and embracing the fact that life is always hard, always hard work, (perhaps always complicated). The bit that changes is the nature of the hard work. I don't have a good plan except to try to give away more, and to figure out how to do well with less, and pray/be open for insights and ideas as the days go by. 

Here are some pictures from the month!

Firstly, a memory of a duck who thought he was human:







Ducky ducks favourite place to sit. (You can also see the seating that Eug built this month, also in preparation for visitors from Korea)

homeschooling with guinea pig in drawer.

snake attacks bug.
tiny tadpole-frog
praying mantis lays eggs in car seat... mmmm....
Eug and Hana prep bathroom for his family visiting from Korea
Eggeater snake stealing eggs. You should see how big its mouth has to get to swallow one.
8 baby ducks having their first swim. The black one on the right was drowned by another female yesterday (also at one week of age), so now we're keeping the ducklings with their mom in a small A frame coop.
Mommy duck. Instincts are horrible and awesome.
Random stuff:
If you want to read about food, check out the weekly roundup of the Society of Food Anthropology, where I alternate with David Beriss on sharing food stories from around the web.

Lastly, if you're in South Africa and want to save seeds, check out this seed savers activist guide! Write to me if you live nearby and would like to save and exchange seeds!