Butchering, Cool Weather Crops, and Saying Goodbye

At the start of the month, Merry Lea Sustainable Farm successfully delivered its tenth week of vegetables, herbs, and value-added products to the ten households participating in our fall community supported agriculture (CSA) program. Since the program began in late August, the fields continued yielding salad mix, broccoli, beets, turnips, carrots, celery, lovage. Hoophouse items such as green beans, okra, parsley, basil, and tomatoes, along with the sturdy goods brought in earlier—onion, garlic, tomatillo, potatoes, ground cherries—enabled us to fill bags quite nicely! Fall CSA is working well for us, and it will surely continue.

The new theme this month has been butchering—endings, grim realities of chickens and hogs becoming meat products now in the freezer. Still to this day, I have yet to witness in person the actual butchering of a pig. I wish to experience this, and could have had the opportunity this year, though was away on a retreat. I was, however, involved with chicken butchering and helping with a program for homeschooled children learning about the range of details and preparation for killing, defeathering, gutting, washing, and bagging chickens. The program was done tactfully, respectfully rather. Joel Pontius, the PreK-12 director at Merry Lea, led the group in some contemplative poetry reading before this began, setting the tone for the humility of taking the life of an animal. The children were attentive, cooperative. Everyone sat in a circle and shared what they will remember most after the activities were complete. I was struck by the maturity of the children, despite their ages. Undergraduates in our Sustainability Leadership Semester also found the experience to be humbling and educational, joining in later that morning, the experience fitting in well to the theme of their Faith, Ethics, and EcoJustice course they were taking at that time.

Writing a monthly reflection has been helpful. I realize there is a tone to most months. For November 2015, I think about the theme of putting lives to rest, of endings, of goodbyes. I, for one, went on retreat in the second half of the month, and I too laid various personal matters to rest, choosing to do so in the desert of New Mexico at a monastery. Many goodbyes preceded my own departure to the southwest, including saying goodbye to our longtime WWOOF volunteer Ryan Minter, who lived and volunteered on the farm for six months, our longest residential volunteer to date.

– Jon Zirkle