Returning.

If I had to look back on the last six months and pinpoint the things that wildly deviated from our normal lifestyle, I couldn't.  

There have been little things that were different.

In July, I called my butcher.  We have been raising meat chickens for just about as long as my youngest daughter (who will be an adult this year) can remember.  I asked her before I wrote that, and she verified that she doesn't really remember not having chickens in our yard.  She was five when we got our first three hens.  That was the year that everything got all shook up, we started seriously looking into homesteading our quarter acre, and I started finding ways to transition us from a typical American diet to a mostly local diet.  

During those early days, it was a challenge to have even one item in a meal that was local.  Creating a meal with ALL local foods was a huge and blog-worthy (with pictures) accomplishment.  Last night for dinner, we had pork chops (from the pig share) with cheesy baked potatoes (from our garden with cheese from a local creamery).  The night before that, we had tacos.  The only thing that wasn't local were the shells and the seasonings.  Everything else, including the homemade salsa, was Maine grown.  Last week we had chicken (we raised), cole slaw (cabbage from my garden), boiled eggs (from our hens), and buttered potatoes (from our garden with butter from a local creamery).  It was all local, except the dressings, and most of it was from my own yard.  In "locavore", we call that the 100 foot diet ;).  As the saying goes, "We've come a long way, baby."

So, when I called my butcher in July, and he hesitated before scheduling me that was a new thing for me.  In the decade - or more - that we have been raising meat birds, he has never hesitated to put me on the schedule.  This year, though, so many people, worried about the future, worried about their finances, worried about getting food from the grocery store, started to raise their own.  

In March, just as I always have, I filled out my chick order forms at the local feed store.  I had my birds on order, just as I always have.  

Then, I started hearing stories about people trying to find laying hens and/or meat birds, and there just not being any available.  All of the usual places where baby chicks are sold were completely out-of-stock.  I was lucky, I guess, that I have always pre-ordered mine.

As with all years past, we split up the meat birds into a couple of different groups.  We only have a quarter of an acre, and so we can't really raise 50 birds at a time, like most folks do.  We place two to three orders of 10 to 15 birds each, to be received at intervals throughout the summer.  

This year was no different.  I placed an order for hens in early April, for my first set of meat birds to arrive mid-May, and for the last set of meat birds to arrive mid-June.  

The first group of 15 meat birds were ready to go to the butcher in early July, and so I called on a Friday to schedule for Monday, because my butcher only does chickens on Mondays.  He told me that the summer is usually their down time.  Not this year.  This year, they were full out, every Monday, butchering chickens, because so many people had decided that now was a good time to start learning to raise their own.

While it makes me happy (really, it does) that so many people are finally getting bitten by the self-sufficiency bug, it's also a little sad, to me, that it took this emergency to spur people in this direction.  It's also a little ... annoying isn't exactly the right word, but it fits ... to come up against shortages for things that I have always done, because suddenly everyone else wants to do them, too.  But worse are the people who, then, act as if it's some new and great idea that they came up with.  Um ....  Yeah.   

So, I scheduled my first set of 15, and my butcher asked if I would have more later.  See?  He knows that I raise meat birds, 10 to 15 at a time, over the whole summer.  I told him that I would.  He advised me to schedule to bring them in and gave me a date in the middle of August.  "If they start to get too big," he told me (because Cornish-cross, which is the breed of meat chicken I raise, and he knows it, tend to grow really big, really fast.  It's exactly the reason I, and so many other people, raise them for meat), "give us a call and we can see about fitting you in sooner."

I didn't call.  

The average meat chicken in the grocery store is around 3 lbs.  It's the same breed of chicken that I raise, but those birds are butchered at between five and eight weeks.  My chickens were probably ten to twelve weeks old when I took them to "See Ken" - our family's euphemism for taking the chickens to the butcher.  The largest was over 8 lbs fully dressed.

It's not unusual for us to have such large chickens.  We've done it before. What is unusual is for us to have such large chickens, because the butcher was too busy to take my birds. 

Because I was home more, I had the best garden I have had in years.  I was able to do things this year that I have always wanted to do, but just didn't have the time - like successive plantings.  I planted lettuce in the spring.  We ate salads for a month.  Then, the lettuce started to bolt, because it got too warm.  I recently replanted lettuce for the fall.  I've never done that before.

I also planted more potatoes.  I plant my potatoes in old feed sacks.  My first crop was planted in May.  I planted a second set of bags in June.  In July, I started harvesting potatoes from the bags I had planted in May, and because I had empty bags, I planted more potatoes.

For seed, I used potatoes that were sprouting in my kitchen.  If I were a commercial potato farmer, I probably wouldn't want to plant those potatoes, because the crop is unreliable, and the potatoes are often small, but for my home garden, food grown from free seed is no small potatoes.  

Also in the garden, I was able to really nurture a few of the volunteers.  I ended up with yellow squash that was growing from seeds thrown into my compost pile.  

And my tomatoes, which were planted in buckets this year, THRIVED, because I was home more and was able to water them more regularly.

Spending more time at home, I have been doing a lot more cooking.  Between not wanting to be out in public anyway, and there just not being any really good choices for take-out for us, because of some dietary restrictions (we are, by doctor recommendation, gluten-free), I've really had driven home the fact that my home cooking is just better than restaurant fare.  Not that I'm such a great chef, but mostly because when we eat at home, I have total control over what we consume.  So, locally sourced, organic, or home-grown ingredients were on the menu almost every day this summer.  

The real benefit to my being home more was to our pocketbook.  Cooking at home saves us a lot of money.   Limiting trips to the store and/or shopping with a grocery delivery service eliminated most of those impulse purchases, which saved us a lot.  

We also had time, this summer (usually we are really busy with work and volunteer stuff) to think about later in the year.  For the first time, in a long time, we have all the wood we need for the winter ... and then, some.   We heat, exclusively, with wood, which means a lot of wood.  We had five cords delivered, and it's stacked and ready for this winter.  We have a full freezer.  We have plenty of toilet paper.  

A couple of projects that needed doing, but weren't a priority, got done, too.

And, because we are uncertain of what this winter will hold, we've already started talking about holiday gift-giving, and we have some ideas of what we want to do.  For certain, we know that we will be shopping early for things we plan to buy, and starting earlier than usual with things we plan to make.  

For me, this year has been a reminder of why we started doing things the way we do, and I have been given the opportunity to return to the lifestyle that makes me feel fulfilled.