The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
It looks like we’ll have most of our fall field work actually done in the fall this year. The recent windy weather patterns have been holding off the first snow until a more respectable time of the year, like Christmas and not Halloween. It was 20 years ago when Minnesota was socked in with two feet of snow to kick off November.
I remember the storm well. I was a new stay at home mom with a six-week old baby. Talk about a culture shock. Suddenly I felt as if I were grounded with no chance of parole with a cellmate who didn’t speak English. However, with nowhere to go and no field work to do, the long winter season gave Mark and me a chance to adjust to our new jobs as Dad and Mom. It is amazing how things work out.
This year’s long harvest is helping farmers to close out a strange growing season. It has been an up and down year from too much rain to too little rain; from high summer heat to early freezing lows. Sometimes it felt like nothing was going right, yet we seem to find a way to keep moving forward.
The long dry harvest has helped the hunters of the family too. With field work done, there are very few places for deer to hide. The boys have been hunting our creek and wooded area for the past several years. Mark taught them how to hunt on our land, but once the boys were big enough to go on their own, he hasn’t had the chance to even spot a deer through his scope. His luck changed this opening weekend.
Michael and Austin were trying to “provide meat for the family for a long and cold winter.” They weren’t having much luck. The neighbors to the south were bagging 7 and 10 point bucks on the opening morning. Austin only saw tails and Michael spied a raccoon. Sunday morning was quiet too. After church and a quick Sunday nap, Austin and Mark made plans to “drive the deer”. Mark would wait and Austin would try to scare the deer up from the swampy low lands. Austin has put two deer in the freezer the past two years and figured it was his dad’s turn. Sure enough, a deer popped up from the swamp and ran in Mark’s direction. On the run, Mark was able to put the young doe down and fulfill his duty of “providing meat for the family”.
As the deer hangs from the rafters of the machine shed, it is my turn to find room for it in the freezer. Of course most farm families have more than one freezer. We have three. Two are in the house for food. One is in the back feed room filled with buckets of colostrum and extra room for meat. Even with all of these freezers on the farm, it is still hard to find room for the young doe, let alone a fat freemartin heifer named “Freezer” walking around in the lot. Mark is baffled as to why we have an “empty” freezer, yet we have no room for butchering. It all has to do with timing. By October the freezer is ready for a long winter. We’ve packed away rhubarb, strawberries, sweet corn, peaches and apple pie fillings. The freezers are full of everything except meat.
With a busy summer of packing food away in the freezer, I’ve been trying to avoid looking inside very often. It is like catching a glimpse of a teenager’s room. Clutter everywhere. You just grab what you need off the top and quickly slam the door shut. Only now the frost has started to build up around the edges and the door is having a hard time sealing up. It is time to put on a warm pair of insulated gloves and go freezer diving.
With a sleeping bag spread across the garage floor, I start to unpack the freezer. Hanging over the edge of the freezer like a rug draped across the clothesline, I dig to the deep recesses to find an assortment of lost treasures. I discover there must have been a very good special on ice cream this summer as I pull out 3 pails and 4 boxes of a variety of flavors. I find remnants of frozen root beer someone left in the freezer too long to chill and the bottle exploded. Spilled BBQ sauce coat ice crystals along the back wall of the freezer. The dog is rewarded for staying out of the garage with a package of meat from ’09 that was lost on the bottom.
The biggest surprise I discovered freezer diving came in a clear gallon bag stuffed with something chopped and green. At first I thought it was a bag of dried dill weed or parsley I forgot about, but as I started to study the contents more closely I could see thick stems and fine dry straw. I threw the bag on the kitchen counter over night and forgot about my mystery. The next morning I was greeted with the sweet smell of summer in the kitchen. I didn’t know where it was coming from. After morning chores we all headed into the house for breakfast. Mark and Austin spotted the bag of chopped greens on the counter and knew immediately what it was. They froze a sample of fresh chopped hay to submit to a forage contest, only they forgot about it buried in the bottom of the freezer. It smelled as sweet as the day they put it away, but realized the haylage wouldn’t have ferment in the freezer and therefore wouldn’t do well in the contest.
Once the freezer was empty and the ice removed, it is time to pack everything away with a sense of order. After everything is put back we still don’t have much room for meat, but at least I can find what I’m looking for. Now if I could just find an extra freezer for a the rest of our bountiful harvest.
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As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota. (Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.)
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