Tudor Monastery Farm!

Hurrah! Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn have made another historical farming show: Tudor Monastery Farm. It's just the thing to get us through the rest of January and into February. I just love discovering the ingenuity of how people did things without the so-called mod cons. And Eldest and Youngest both love it too.

I had no idea how many uses they had for urine in the Tudor time and how they smelted lead was fascinating. I also discovered that Tudor gardeners encouraged weeds in their beds, because they ate them too or used them medicinally.

We're only four episodes in, but I can already heartily recommend it. We found it on youtube but some problem with the sound made the background music sound horrendous so we switched to dailymotion.com.

dreams and stuff

I've been reading Callings: Finding and Following and Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy, for the third time. Because even after reading it twice, I still haven't sorted my life out. (I realize this is never a complete task, but I feel like I've been on the cusp of major life changes since the first time I read it in 2010 that are still unfolding). I'm going very slowly, mixing it with other books, sometimes just a paragraph or two at a time. I ponder these paragraphs, I sleep on them, and sometimes I dream about them.

Last week, I got to a section about dreamwork. It talks about how our unconscious mind is always a couple steps ahead of our conscious mind, and dreams can be a bridge between the two. Levoy says that sometimes the bridge is obvious, and he goes on to list a bunch of scenarios of waking life challenges and dreams that offer a pretty obvious response. I can't remember them all, except one: You're contemplating an impossible situation, and you dream that you can breathe underwater.

That night, I dreamed that we were at my parents' cottage by the lake. We were chatting with various people and the kids were playing and Youngest kept getting ever closer to the lake. We figured we'd just see what transpired, especially because if we run after him, he tends to run towards the very thing we want him to avoid. So we watched and he jumped in the link and immediately sank. I ran to the water and dove in. In the moment between my feet leaving the dock and my hands entering the water, I was aware that my shoes were still on and I worried they'd weigh me down. But I wasn't about to take the time to remove them.

I swam underwater and saw Youngest slowly sinking. I kept nearly reaching him but he kept sinking and getting further away from me. My breath was running out but there was no way I was going to take the time to get to the surface; he'd been under much longer than me already and I wasn't going to take any more time. And just at the most hopeless moment, I discovered I could breathe underwater.

"Aha!" I thought. "This is just like in the book." I woke up without having actually saved Youngest but with the knowledge that it was possible.

That was a few weeks ago and I haven't picked up the book since. I've been sinking into hibernation, escaping into tv shows after the kids go to bed or books or, for most recently, SouleMama's archive,  and avoiding walking to or from work. Ever since New Year's Eve, when my husband and I agreed to work towards moving to a farm, I've kind of shrunk from that vision. With the deep cold, I've started imagining the discomforts of living on a farm in this kind of cold. With the chickens here now, it doesn't take much imagination, as we're constantly changing their water and checking for eggs to catch them before they freeze. Anyways… I've been doubting. And hiding.

The other night I dreamed about the book again. Youngest has been waking a lot through the nights recently and nursing lots. The other night was another restless night when I had lots of disjointed and jumbled dreams. But one bit stays with me. I discovered the book, Callings, in a dirty puddle of I don't know what, pretty much completely destroyed. And I felt terrible for forgetting it and letting it be destroyed by my neglect.

In my waking life, I feel a bit stuck and adrift. I feel powerless to change anything and like I'm not moving forward. But after the second dream I remember that we are moving forward. We're about to start a kitchen reno to repair all the brokenness of our kitchen so that when we're ready we can sell the house more easily. And in the spring and summer, we'll start to explore farm properties to figure out what we can afford and more clearly what part of the province we want to be in. This is all progress. Not as fast as I would like but patience has never been my strong suit. As Anya said on Buffy, "I tried being patient but it took too long!"

farm show treats

Eldest and I have become addicted to farming shows. It started with Tales from the Green Valley two winters ago and moved through Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm and quite recently Wartime Farm. (I wasn't as big a fan of Wartime Farm. Tales from the Green Valley was really my favourite.) Then we discovered River Cottage and recently finished all the River Cottage shows. In the middle there, we found Australian show Gourmet Farmer, which is A LOT like early River Cottage but in Tasmania.

Now we don't know what to watch. So it was a great thrill to discover (thanks Wikipedia!) that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mr. River Cottage himself, did a few other shows. We're currently gobbling up Treats from the Edwardian Country House, and I'm looking forward to checking out A Cook on the Wild Side whenever we can get a hold of it (it's not on youtube). Pretty much all of the others are on youtube. If you're in Ontario, Wartime Farm is on TVO too. Gourmet Farmer was, ahem, a little harder to get a hold of. Also, be warned that there's a lot of butchering and even some slaughtering on some of those shows. It was a little disturbing in the beginning, but personally, I feel it's important to see, that it's an important reality of eating meat.

Anyone else watch farming shows? Can you recommend any new titles for us?

food

I just finished watching this documentary, Think Global Act Rural. I watched it over several nights, as it's quite dense, thought-provoking material, and I watched it with English subtitles, which made my eyes tire out. But I definitely recommend it.

I think the most surprising thing that came up in the film for me is that growing crops and saving seeds was traditionally a woman's job in many cultures around the world. And more than one speaker in the film linked industrial agriculture's theft of seeds with patriarchy. I love the way this film connects several seemingly disparate issues. It's fascinating, and the speakers are all so well-spoken. I especially enjoyed Vandana Shiva.

Oh - and also Claude Bourguignon, one of the last soil microbiologists in France. He talks about how in the early 80s at university he started in agronomy but couldn't stand what the field was doing so he switched to soil microbiology where he was the only student. Shortly after her graduated, the entire department of soil microbiology shut down, a trend that he said happened around the world, so now there are no more soil microbiology departments. He says now anyone studying agriculture doesn't know that soil is alive.

Here is a trailer for the film.


I most definitely recommend it. More and more I'm starting to think that sustainable farming may be about the most radical thing a person can do.

My husband and I also watched Food Inc. a little while ago. I see its slogan is "You'll never look at dinner the same way again," and I'd have to say that was our experience. And I considered myself a pretty food savvy person. After watching it, the very next time we were at the Farmers' Market, we bought some pastured chicken and ground turkey. I'm seriously considering trying grass-fed beef, even though I haven't eaten beef in about 12 years. I have a friend who had similar gastrointestinal complaints after eating (corn-fed) beef but she said she recently was at a party with lots of grass-fed beef and she couldn't stop eating it and she didn't have any complaints afterward.

In addition to the startling information in the film, I liked that it portrayed all the farmers interviewed in a reasonable light. The only villains are the corporations driving all this crazy change. The chicken segment especially got me thinking about debt as a tool of social control. If you eat, you should watch it.

Edited to add: I just did a little research on Vandana Shiva and wow! She studied philosophy here at Guelph! She's also a nuclear freakin' physicist! And she was recently here to receive an honorary degree. She also did an interview on CBC radio - definitely worth listening to.