Garlic Planting, Pannage, and the Killing Frost

Preparing for death's caress / The negligible nutritional value of Asian lady beetles

The low angled sun of middle-late October reaches through the weathered and shrugging branches of the stubborn Osage orange, battered and gold-flecked at the tips and terminal ends, but somehow still enduring between now and when a good freeze finally creeps in. The Osage orange, or as I knew it as a child, the monkey brain tree, produces baseball to softball size fruits, inedible to most humans, and while a few have dropped in the stiff winds of changing seasons, it isn’t until a killing frost that they begin to violently shower down in the old fencelines and bottomland canopies. Our little farm stand sits beneath one particularly twisted old mother Osage, and when the fruits finally drop, certainly sometime in the next week, they go off like shotgun blasts as they bombard the little recycled tin roof of the stand, echoing the distant rifle-fire of deer hunters.

I suppose it’s called a killing frost because it largely kills most of the vegetation, or lays it dormant ‘til spring, but it also happens to signal the time for killing. And while I’ve already worked through about 4 dozen ducks since September, the daytime temps will soon become sub-microbial, and this is when I must strike. ‘Til then, we gather squash and sweet potatoes from their plots, returning to the giving soil cartloads of composted manure and seed garlic, the hesitant last-rites of the garden year, an investment in the fact that yes, for some reason, I am committed to coming back through these gates again in the future.

We have never grown quite enough garlic, typically planting around 500-600 cloves most years. The winter necessitates garlic for all the charcuterie and sausage, brothy soups, and modest starch we are preparing to survive on. While it’s true that garlic does contain some healthy, immune boosting compounds, they say you need to consume a good bit of it in its unadulterated form to receive these benefits, and that is a challenge I’ll take. And when we plant garlic here on the farmstead, we like to give it the luxury spa treatment that we cannot ourselves afford: a gentle warm water bath in soapy water for 20-30 minutes to “wake up” the cloves from their days of dormant waiting in wreaths under the eaves, and to also treat the seed for possible pest and disease contamination, such as nematodes. Each clove, moisturized, focused, and in its furrow is given a good hug of sweet compost and laid in place. Before the depth of winter blows in the beds will be spotted with tiny green spires of growth: the emergent promise of another year spent toiling for tokens, but eating well. If you want to pre-treat your garlic seed, be gentle. You’re showing it care, not scalding a hog. Keep your water temperature comfortable.

That western afternoon sun, the trademark of an up-pressure fall day brings with it a minor aerial infestation of Asian lady beetles, fleeing the reaping mow of soybean combines from the fields now shorn of shelter. These little things (look like lady bugs, but sort of orange brown, taste bad) were introduced as a way to control soybean aphids. No idea if that worked out, but the little dudes are everywhere, collecting in crevices, firewood boxes, window screens, and often our water tank. It seems like every year there comes a time when the water isn’t flowing through our spigot so well, and upon inspecting the offending pipe I will find a dozen little fake ladybugs squished in the valve. Of all the invasives I deal with here, these are the ones I shrug off the most. Nobody eats them, sometimes they bite, but as long as they’re having a good time, I guess I can cope. In comparison with multiflora rose, they are a minor annoyance. Much like hedge balls, I have no advice on what to do about them or what they’re good for, just don’t eat ‘em.

Our home is soon to be filled with baskets and cardboard boxes of last tomatoes, final eggplants, and ultimate peppers, not to mention the feedsacks full with sweet potatoes and a menagerie of winter squash, stashed under beds, in attic shelves, behind couches, and piled next to the boots. We are purging the irrigation lines and rolling them up, bedding and preparing the barns, and bringing the pastured animals nearer and nearer to home as the grasses dry and go dormant. Osage orange leaves have a tendency to drop all at once when the killing frost comes, and the parade of goats up and along the old fencerows will be able to pick the nutritious leaves up where they lie, provided they do not become soiled in autumn rains and mud.

The turkeys and pigs press on in their pursuit of winter fat, combing the draws and bottoms for acorn mast. Entire ecologies have formed surrounding the giving nature of mature oaks and their propensity for playing the numbers game of regeneration. (I recommend checking out the recent Poor Prole’s Almanac piece embedded at the end on oaks for a depth of understanding.) Here in the Midwest, deer, squirrels, and blue jays, to name a few common acorn eaters do the work of dissemination and cultivation for oaks: deer tromp through the underbrush of oak stands in search of acorns, trampling growth, aerating forest debris with their hooves which aids in decomposition, browsing brush, allowing increased sunlight for the remaining acorns to sprout. Squirrels gather great caches of nuts… only sometimes remembering where they are kept. Inevitably, abandoned caches become deposits for seed. Jays do the work of spreading oak seed whenever they drop acorns in flight to safe perching spots. Wild turkeys also do much to steward their acorn-eating grounds by scratching at leaf litter, as well as reducing pest pressure for dense oak populations.

The practice of allowing pigs into the woods for a limited duration for the purpose of fattening on acorns is known as pannage. As a legal right of commoners in pre-enclosure Europe, pannage was often practiced for a period of around sixty days, from mid-September to mid-November, and payment for the privilege of this foraging was typically one of the hogs given to the Lord of the manor, but sometimes a mere ceremonial tax. Alongside coppicing, grazing, haying and gleaning, pannage was a way for the landed to afford landless commoners some of the necessities of survival in the middle ages, like fat and meat, and in return receive some care and management of wooded areas. There are ecosystems in England (still existent in parts of the south where historical conservation efforts remain) in which the swine and swineherder play a vital role in the composition of native woodlands… much like the prairie savanna ecosystem I live in, which necessitates human habitation and stewardship through fire and mass movements of ruminant animals, the soils of these south English woods need the guided disturbance of autumn swine herds to bear ephemeral spring wildflowers. (I have a bit more to say about these pre-enclosure common rights in an Almanac entry from earlier this year, also embedded below.) And so, not too different from my medieval counterparts, I too will need fat for the winter. As the flow of milk and cream in our dairy herd diminishes with the slumbering grasses, so too does the potential for butter and cheese, easily accessible summer fats. Another year of toiling for tokens is threatening to make me drive a new buckle hole in my belt, and this stockpile of squash and sweet potato will be of little benefit without the delightful lubricant that is processed pork fat: lard. And for the lard to stack up the way I want it, these pigs will need acorns.  

It is important to follow the example set by commons pannage practitioners of allowing only limited and carefully managed hog pressure down in the woods. Pigs left to linger for too long can easily damage soils and tree roots, or even reduce the population of acorns to the detriment of other wildlife. While I do not allow our livestock into these areas when soils are excessively soft, I have accidentally allowed them to clear too many acorns from the draw, only to watch hungry squirrels emerge from the woods in late winter devour the bark on some of our trees in search of nourishing sap. It may be true that the Tragedy of the Commons trope was a bit of propaganda spread to dispossess peasants of their land access and push them into urban servitude, but there’s also some truth in the near-sightedness of some “back-to-the-land” folks who haven’t been on the land for generations not quite grasping the delicate balance required in making our relationship with place mutualized for continued survival. And thus, the preponderance of YouTube knowitalls out there damaging land with machinery and misguided practices. So… don’t put your pigs in the woods unless you’re able to observe their interactions with the ecosystem and can respond accordingly that day.

Obtaining all that sweet acorn-fueled fat will naturally require what many folks might consider drastic measures, that is, killing my pigs. The killing frost brings the killing of swine, the provisioning of death into sustained life. I cannot completely justify what we do… we kill to eat, to maintain some type of economic livelihood, and as the logical conclusion of a season spent (I hope) manipulating the movements and impacts of livestock towards an ecologically and environmentally beneficial end. But an animal does not consent to its death; for one thing, an animal does not have that ability. And as a “good feminist” I value consent. The definition of, let alone the existence of sentience outside of human beings is a bit difficult to pin down. And the sanctity of life is unconvincing to me as well, knowing first hand how many small lives must be taken to provide vegetables on our own slight and stripped down scale, in comparison with the millions of acres of lost habitat and total extermination of souls out there in agricultural lands around the world meant to provide the allegedly clean and simple staples we all rely on. And ethanol, don’t forget the ethanol.

And so I’ll make no attempt, at least not in this particular edition of the Almanac, to justify my killing of animals, but I will admit that every year it brings to the surface certain moral ponderings, and at times, a great deal of grief. I’d rather it be at my own hands that I do this work rather than outsource the killing. Because I hear a lot of farmers and homesteaders, especially in the world of humane and sustainable husbandry, make this thoughtless, cliched statement over and over again: “Our animals only have one bad day”... and I think that’s bullshit. If your livestock have a bad day as a result of how you butcher them, then you’re butchering them wrong.

Killing animals humanely is a skill that requires we understand the natural behaviors of our herd. It requires our willingness to know who we’re killing. The pig that’s been placed in a concrete floored corral for its last day, separated from the herd, in an unfamiliar place after a trailer ride deserves a finer death. Nothing upsets a pig more than separation from the herd. A pig can be shot at the trough next to its family, and no one other pig express concern. They might sniff around, but pigs, for all their intelligence, do not seem to understand death in the same way that we do. But they do understand separation, and they fear it, and so on our farm, the pigs are shot and stuck amongst their siblings at the trough, out beneath the giving oaks. Goats are different. They will mourn if they witness another member of the herd die before them. Better to separate the goat to be killed, for that goat will believe it’s getting something special, and the others will feel mostly jealousy. These concepts I present are no more provable than animal sentience, but I present them as my honest experience and observation, nonetheless.

The killer must ease all anxieties, allow the killed to live a natural and unassuming life up until the brain and body are dead. And so each evening I go down to the oaks where my herd of pigs waggles and snuffles in the leaf litter for acorns, and we pet the pigs, and feed them little cull sweet potatoes, and I press the barrel of my weapon between their eyes. They have grown used to this new tool. They know that when it’s present, they will receive snacks and affection. And some day soon, with the proper weather, my nerves eased, and my intentions clear, that will be the whole world they ever knew.

With ill-fitting pants and clear intention,

BB

Here’s a link to Andy’s great work on acorns:

Oaks & Acorns

…and another to my own piece on traditional medieval commons systems. As an archived piece, you will need to become a paid supporter to access it. Gotta find a way to keep my pants up.