Tomato flowers on May 15?
At the same time as pea flowers?
We've had radishes, pak choi, several types of mustard greens, spinach, and arugula already bolt and flower after pretty lame harvests or, in the case of the radishes, no harvest at all. We're nursing the onions along only by watering like it's August. But this stretch of cooler weather has every plant unhunching its shoulders and raising its arms to the cloudy sky, heat stress mostly forgotten.
The upside is that our actual summer crops as well as fall crops, like dry and green beans, summer and winter squash, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes, are already ginormous. Actually, the squash are bigger than the peas.
And these beauties, which got mostly shade in the afternoons, made it all the way to our plates.
I guess even if we have to pull even more bolting confused spring crops in the weeks to come, at least our pigs will be happy to eat them.
We took these three piglets home about a week ago. Believe it or not, they'll be 250 pounds in a few short months (right now they're about the size of our cat). Until then, we plan to pamper them with an expanse of woods to root around in and a lot of organic feed. They'll live kingly and queenly lives, as far as pigs go. And then they'll pair perfectly with those winter squash and potatoes in early November.
It's funny, a few years ago I'm not sure I would have approved of a statement like that about baby pigs. I would have squirmed to think of them as future food. But raising our own animals for meat has changed my perspective. Now meat is not just vacuum-sealed protein to buy in a store. Meat is mornings spent striding through dewy pastures carrying buckets of grain and salt, and the baaing hellos of ewes and lambs that nose up to my legs and nibble my work jeans. Meat is the chickens who wander free around our yard and the pastures, forming subgroups and cliques that we nickname and gossip about at dinner. (Have you seen the Deputy recently? He's always hanging around the Three Stooges now.) Meat is planning—electric fence line or hog panels? Can three piglets fit in the back of the Jetta? Meat is poring over YouTube videos on butchering techniques and researching charcuterie recipes and planning what cuts we want to eat, sharpening knives and buying butcher paper. Meat is the fascination and art of transforming a whole side of pig or lamb into cuts that we wrap and mark with sharpie and store up in the freezer and carefully cook through, one at a time. Meat is knowing our animals lived well, ate well, were healthy and honored, and in turn give us nourishment we feel right about.
So it has its messy parts. There's no way to romanticize plucking a chicken or scalding a pig. But my life is infinitely richer for the animals we raise, in their lives outside and in their lives in our freezer. The dots connect.
Not everyone can or wants to raise animals for themselves. But it's driven home, for me, more than any book or article, how deeply important it is to care about the meat you eat and the animals it comes from—at the most basic, were they given the space they need, fed food they naturally want to eat?—and to use your purchase power to communicate that care.
Soapbox over.
