There’s an old saying that goes “you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family”. Somewhere in between those two extremes are neighbours. Certainly you can select your neighbourhood carefully but it’s never a sure bet on what might move in next door. I can barely fathom how people co-exist in high rise apartments these days. Packed dozens to a tin like Italian sardines with inadequate estate agents, they have to get on each others nerves almost constantly. My own shift from houses parked in the remote wilds of snowbound forests to sharing a wall between two (mercifully kind) families at my temporary and gently rural apartment has been easier that I thought it would be but even now I have to stop myself from operating the megablender at 3am or watching movies with the surround sound in full thumping mode.
I have of course found my future destination just up the road on the twenty five acres that will become North Farthing. Plenty of space and freedom and buffer zone between parcels to get back to life as I define it. Namely without a care about the time of day or noise generation or any of the other countless urban neighbourhood considerations that beseech city folk. But even here with acres between us, you want to know your neighbours are good people. I got lucky in the neighbour lottery it seems.
I had the chance to catch up with my “farm neighbour” as I call her last weekend after a good while away when she kindly invited me out for a barbecue afternoon with friends. We both bought our respective properties from the same pensioner at the same time back in 2013. That kindly old woman had been living away for most of the year and just wanted rid of the parcels that inhabited two sides of the same road. While my new neighbour, let’s call her “FN”, got the place with housing on it and moved in straight away, I got the empty land across the street and have been plotting and planning my attack on construction ever since. Seeing what she’s been able to do with her place even in that short time is a real boost to my mental sanity in that I see it’s a good life waiting out there for me eventually.
What I didn’t know and what makes my luck of the draw that much better is how nuts FN is for animals. She recently graduated from proper farm college and has put her knowledge base to immediate use with good effect. I never even knew there was a tractor test but she has passed hers. I asked how many non-human beasts lived there now and no one could come up with a proper head count. Horses, chickens, rabbits, goats, and a very excitable little dog is the minimum I could see and if you count mouths, I’m guessing over forty. I suspect she’s as much of a soft target for charity animal cases as I am. To quote FN “It’s amazing how many calls you get in the middle of the night asking if you want a goat.”
Why is this good? For starters she takes great care of them all and that means no unpleasantly intense farm aromas wafting over to my place. I couldn’t smell anything even next to the horse pens. We both have plenty of space and this isn’t a feedlot operation we’re talking about. Just a good old-fashioned family farm. Avid readers might recall that the ‘smell test’ was paramount when I was shopping for land a while back because Maritime Canada seems replete with foul odors bellowing out of everything from pulp mills to rendering plants. We’re thankfully in the olfactory clear out at the farm.
Her abundance of chickens also means I’ve got access to one of the foodstuffs that I’ve been agonizing over for years. Fresh eggs. I am absolutely a champion of eggs from happy chickens raised in the open air. The real open air eating grasshoppers and lettuce trimmings while chasing each other at full gallop. Not some industrial use of the word “free range” that gets watered down with every government or industry revamp of the legal definition. I simply refuse to buy battery eggs or intensively-raised chickens for my own consumption and have sought out local egg farmers for years to avoid that particularly nasty end of the food industry.
Yet for all my raging against the ‘business’ of eggs I don’t think I could bring myself to raise my own. Those may be famous last words and despite my protests to the contrary I might end up with half a dozen incredibly pampered hens one day but It boils down to the simple fact that I can’t kill anything and part of chicken raising is the inevitable death factor. It happens even on the best of farms as part of the process and as utterly irrational as my own brain is on the topic, I just don’t deal with that well. I’d give them all names and end up holding chicken funerals or taking in hundreds of unproductive chicken retirees. Couple that with all the stories about chickens versus predators, chickens eating gardens indiscriminately, chickens pooping on everything, and the general availability of chickens across the street for eggs, fowl-based comedy, and general chicken Zen and I’m off the hook for bird cultivation with any luck. Best of all worlds I say.
Chatting with FN at her place has reinforced my belief that except for two lazy indoor cats, I’m going animal free at North Farthing. Aside from the egg factor that she’s got well covered, the only other beast I’d want is something to give me a source for cheese and twice-daily dairy milking schedules and cow/sheep/goat shovelling is definitely not something I want in my future. Beyond the few kilos I make at home now I’ll have to find someone local as a volume milk source should I ever take up cheese making with any cottage industry verve.
No, it’s going to be basil and apples and cucumbers for me. Long live the the pumpkin patch and get some more blueberry bushes in the ground already. Orchards never need their stalls cleaned. Hot houses don’t make any noise and can wait a few days between feedings. Basil doesn’t poop and you can harvest its leaves in the same place every time. Cider sells better than pork chops and you don’t have to name each apple.
Of course there is always an exception. Hundreds of thousands of them in my case. I’m talking bees here. My preferred livestock will buzz about gathering nectar in the pastures. I need the pollinators and the wax as well as the obvious sweet gold. I should after all have more than just tomatoes to barter and wildflower honey for fresh omelettes seems a fair trade.
I joked with FN that I always seemed to be giving her family members my empty egg cartons because I’ve been saving them for her parents who are also good friends with chickens of their own on the other side of the county. I handed her a few empties when I arrived and the sneaky woman slipped a dozen eggs into my car when I wasn’t looking at the end of the afternoon. I really did get lucky in the neighbour lottery.
ps. If she approves, I’ll get a gallery of FN’s chickens and goats and the rest of the menagerie up the next time I remember to take my camera out to the farm.
update: Here you go, internet. Photos of FN’s beasties in all their free range glory. And even a little goat video. Enjoy!
