Circle M Farm

What have we been up to here at Circle M? Well, September and October flew by in a rush of harvest tasks and celebrations. In our extended rural neighborhood, farms throw parties for hope in spring and gratefulness in fall. These open house festivals are lovely quotation marks on either side of “The Growing Season” and we threw our own this fall as well as attended those of friends. Many of you joined us here around the fires, both inside and out, and we very much enjoyed the shared meals, music and merriment of craft and conversation that closed out our garden year. We hope you’ll come back again in spring when the whole circle starts again. In the meantime, we’ve shifted gears as the outdoor work of sowing and tending is supplanted by indoor tasks of woolcraft and bookkeeping.

Although we continue to visit with and feed our various animals twice daily through the winter months, the focus of our farm life changes dramatically as the light begins to recede. Shannon, my husband, and I find that our energy levels drop quickly when the sun goes down and we are ready for bed hours earlier than in summer when we don’t come inside the house until 9 pm most nights. The change was terrifying at first, honestly, and in late October as the parties wound down, the weight of our evening exhaustion prompted us to question our ability to put in another year of homesteading.

But we’ve almost now adjusted to life on the other side of the circle. Getting up later and going to bed earlier are a healing respite from the full-on physicality of the growing season, and one we certainly need to embrace if we’re going to farm sustainably. So we are slowly setting our goal for bedtime earlier and earlier. As winter gets closer, we find that we not only spend more time in bed, we also spend more time at the table. With less time spent in the garden, we’ve got more time to make and to eat food, and I’m beginning to understand that as another invitation to experience the healing nature of the dormant months.

Our new kittens. I’m trying to learn their secrets of relaxation.

Farm work, however, doesn’t cease in the cold season, though the tasks are overall much less physically demanding. While the body rests and recuperates, the mind of a farmer in winter is hard at work evaluating the yields, performance and profits of crops and livestock. Seed must be ordered for gardens; minerals and medicines replenished for animals; equipment repaired and readied for spring. Last but not least, today’s small farmer must also spend a significant part of the “off” months on marketing. Without the built-in delivery systems of an old-fashioned local economy, the task lies with the farmer to not only grow the food, but also to find the customers. Small farming is much like any other entrepreneurial small business.

During my first month inside this year, I’ve been cleaning up the many messes we make during the frantic growing season. Baskets of seed packets and piles of catalogs almost block the entryway to our bedroom, which serves as a large closet when we don’t have time to really put things away. Buried within the chaos, I’ll find my garden journals and various important notes I scratched on scrap paper while in the fields. In December I’ll try to decipher and analyze that information and use it to make good decisions when I order seed in January. By February, I’ll be starting plants in flats next to the woodstove!

The aspect of our farm business that takes center stage in the winter months is Maidmarion Cottage Industries – our fiber supply and woolcraft venture. It’s an ad-venture, really, as I finally get to dig my hands into the fluffy harvest of hair shorn from my fine-wool sheep and angora goats back in the spring. All summer the fleeces have waited, stuffed in bags labeled with the name of each animal and stored floor-to-ceiling on the wood shelves of my dye studio. The studio, connected to my house by a mudroom, is tricked out with its own washing machine and stove so I can wash and dye wool without trashing the house. It also doubles as a horse tack room, seed-starting potting shed, summer canning kitchen, root cellar for winter crops, woodshop for small projects and retail counter for meat sales! Unfortunately, all these functions will soon have to make way for our Volvo station wagon, since the studio will become our garage the moment we’ve got snow of any significance.

So my November days are a multi-tasking jumble of colors and textures as I crisscross the house and studio, moving wool through the various steps toward becoming finished yarns, purses, hats, toys, jewelry and kits for others to do the same. While raw fleeces soak in the studio washing machine, washed fleeces simmer in dyepots of various sizes and shapes on top of the stove. Inside the house, rainbows of wool fluff are piled around the fire. Once dry, clouds of wool are whisked to one of our dining room tables where I use something that looks like a medieval torture device to pick it into loose bits which are then combed straight in one of two drum carders. On another dining room table, the combed wool is felted into various jewelry pieces and embellishments using bowls of soapy water and a frightening assortment of long barbed needles.

Picker and carders.

Emma, 13, tries to eat and do homework on a table crowded with projects!

Carded wool ready to spin into yarn.

My spinning perch – the little milking stool is where my glass of wine sits.

During evenings when the kids are home, I stack balls of soft combed wool next to me on the the couch where I spin in front of the fire while we watch movies. “Darjeeling Limited” is up next on our Netflix queue, though we have several television series addictions we also feed through Netflix – Alias, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development and Ugly Betty are current favorites. When one of my daughters has a basketball game – three times a week – I stuff the spun yarn into one of many project bags and take it along to knit up into hats and scarves while I yell for the team.

Today is cold outside, but sun pours generously through the windows, illuminating my wool messes like the jeweled mounds of treasure in a dragon’s lair. I feel rich. This busy farmhouse is my cozy lair, and I love my winter work. Once the animals are fed and watered, I’ll come inside to the warmth, made humid by damp fleeces, put some Hank Williams on the turntable, fill up my coffee cup and see what I can make.

If you’d like me to make something special just for you or for a gift – leave me a message to contact you and we’ll design something to have ready for Christmas!

Felt ball embellishments.