The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  A lucky otter, I thought, to have his meal contained in those convenient tanks. And then I realized that we weren’t so different. Like the otter, we could dash across the road any time we wanted and find ourselves surrounded by bounty—before disappearing back into our native habitat, our cozy little place that was starting to feel like home. Of course, his miracle was in the move from hunter-gatherer to inadvertent farmer. His food supply was secure, as long as his humans continued to tend it. My miracle was in my move backward—from a macaroni-and-cheese punk rocker who uprooted strawberries, to a woman who could coax green things out of the ground and onto dozens of families’ plates. A woman who just might end up a farmer’s wife, after all.

  I looked from where the otter had vanished to the humble silver ring on my hand. It didn’t fit on my ring finger (which Emmett had guessed to be the size of his pinky), so it was on my middle finger instead. The Starbucks woman, the WIC mothers, the foodies: concepts of cost melted away. That particular radish? This simple ring? Some things are beyond concepts of price.

  Chapter 12:

  DAIRY DEVILS

  Rotating Ruminants

  No sooner had we gotten engaged than I set out to convince Emmett that we should have kids. Seven of them. My argument went something like this.

  Vegetables: check. Fruits: check. Roots, tubers, bulbs: check, check, check. Eggs: check. And yet didn’t it seem like our farm was missing something? Our house was surrounded by grassy hillsides that had been grazed down by the rabid cows that had nearly crushed me in an attempt to wrest corn stalks from the truck. At first, I thought that maybe it was sheep we were lacking. Or perhaps a sheepdog.

  Sheep, I reasoned, would be relatively low maintenance. They’d keep the grasses neatly trimmed. The breed I selected—Babydoll Southdowns, a heritage English breed that is petite enough to weed beneath grapevines—was in hot demand in the Sonoma wine country, and the lambs sold for as much as $750 per animal. I could sell any lambs that were born and make a little money off my livestock, which would also function as something for a dog to herd.

  Actually, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember which argument I took. I wanted a herding dog, so we needed sheep for her—or I wanted sheep, so I needed a herding dog. I may have taken different tactics at different times. Regardless, the growing menagerie somehow provided justification for purchasing itself and the sheep and Aussie puppy arrived on our farm around the same time.

  The failed sheep experiment began with a breeding trio of Babydoll Southdown sheep inelegantly stuffed in the back of our pickup truck, to the great delight of our wiggly puppy, Kea, perched between us on the armrest. Three sheep: one male, Teddy, who would turn out to be further proof of my male livestock hypothesis; and two pleasantly timid ewes. I say “pleasantly timid” because the only thing worse than a stupid, fearful sheep is a stupid, aggressive sheep. Or, as Monty Python put it, “That most dangerous of animals ... the clever sheep.”

  At first I was awed by the sight of the sheep grazing the hillside behind our house. How perfectly pastoral, I thought. Boy, were we real farmers, or what? Even Emmett agreed that the sight of the sheep wandering through tall grasses at sunset was a little slice of heaven. The bleating was pleasant (from far away, anyway), a soothing sound straight out of Wordsworth’s hills.

  It took me several weeks before I started to realize what many a farmer already knows: sheep suck.

  Unlike chickens, sheep have the personality of a spoon. I know that a handful of shepherds may argue with me, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of them would agree wholeheartedly—and that, like me, they end up tolerating sheep because they love their herding dog. Or maybe they delight in mutton or lamb. Or they inherited a sheep farm and haven’t been able to find an idiot to buy it. Or perhaps, for some unfathomable reason, they prefer the aggravating bleat of a hungry sheep to the annoying drone of a lawnmower.

  Neither Emmett nor I had ever kicked or hit an animal before; it just wasn’t in our character. But on separate occasions, we each took a whack at Teddy. It is extremely difficult to avoid hurting an animal that has just pummeled you with all the force in his hefty, stocky body—has in fact knocked you to the ground that he has conveniently just shat upon—and is backing up to do it again with a look in his eye that comes straight from hell. We figured we needed to go Cesar Milan on his ass: teach him that we, and not he, were the top rams in the flock.

  Unfortunately, performing self-defense karate on Teddy was like kicking a boulder. It hurt the foot far more than the ram. Actually, kicking Teddy was worse than kicking a rock: rocks don’t laugh at you. After what I thought was a powerful counter-attack—his head meeting my sole instead of its intended destination, which was the soft spot behind my knees—Teddy would wiggle his tail, which seemed to be ovine for, “Hee hee; that tickles, silly human.” Then he’d use me as a scratching post and rub his oily, snotty nose on my leg. Then, if I turned my back, the rat bastard ottoman of a sheep would ram me again.

  We soon gave up on teaching Teddy a lesson and learned to live in fear of the sound of rapid hoof-beats. Jokes about mutton assuaged my damaged farm ego, although we had no serious intention of eating Teddy. Instead, we kept him long enough to impregnate the ewes, and then got rid of him on Craigslist.

  Apparently it wasn’t sheep we were missing. We needed something better: kids. Really, what could be cuter than a kid snuggling with a puppy? We could lock them in the dog crate together so they’d bond with one another. Perfect.

  And so Ginger entered our lives. When she came home to us she was only about four pounds, bound to her bottle but clearly ready to take on the world. We tucked her into a little bed on the floor, but she immediately got up. She leapt onto the couch and from there to the coffee table, where she scared the living daylights out of our lazy house cat. Jasper fled with fluffed fur and a sulking look that I took to mean, “First a puppy, and now what the hell is this thing?”

  Our beleaguered puss had never before come into contact with a Nigerian Dwarf goat kid. Before I went to pick Ginger up from a nearby family farm, neither had I. But as usual, I had performed plenty of research to determine that the Nigerian Dwarf goat was just the right fit for our farm. Originally imported from West Africa in the 1930s, Ginger’s ancestors were destined to be conveniently sized zoo food. Over time, artificial selection of the heritage stock resulted in two different breeds that eventually came to be recognized by the national goat registries: Pygmy (a mini meat goat, short and comically stocky) and Nigerian Dwarf (a mini dairy goat, more Barbie than Ken: fine-boned, slender, and possessed of extremely capacious udders).

  Nigerian Dwarfs—or Nigis, as the obsessed affectionately call them—have enjoyed soaring popularity in recent years. Their small stature and gregarious personalities have made them homestead favorites: like chickens, they excel as both pet and producer. And like heritage breed poultry, they are sufficiently varied so that owners quickly succumb to a “collect them all” mentality.

  Ginger loved using Teddy as a playground—one of the better uses for male livestock I’ve seen.

  Unlike certain goat breeds—for instance, the all-white Saanen—there is no color standard for Nigerian Dwarf goats. Each one is different. They come in black, gold, red, white, dark buckskin, chocolate buckskin, cou clair (pale front quarters shading to black hindquarters), Swiss (black and tan, patterned after the Alpine goat), silver, brown, and chamoisee (tan with dark feet, belly, back stripe, and face). And each of these colors can be moon spotted (dabbed with colored spots), broken with white (patches of white in the midst of a pattern), broken with excessive white (large patches of white dominating a pattern), and accompanied by brown, gold, or blue eyes. Each goat’s appearance is as unique as his or her personality, and personalities run the gamut from reserved but tolerant of human contact to lapdog attention whore. The majority of Nigerians fall on the latter end of the spectrum.

  There are other reasons Nigis make excellent backyard livestock. While full-siz
ed dairy goats can weigh a couple of hundred pounds, a Nigerian gal might top out at fifty pounds and take up approximately the same amount of space as a Labrador retriever. They eat a third of the feed of a regular sized dairy goat, so they’re cheaper to maintain. And thanks to their diminutive stature, they’re easy to handle, even for kids—making them a popular choice in 4H and FFA families. Best of all, the market isn’t yet saturated for these goats, which means it’s fairly easy to place all offspring into loving homes: female kids can be sold off as family milkers, while male kids can be castrated and sold off as weedwhacking pets. In other words, unlike many 4H and FFA projects, your baby doesn’t turn into sausage.

  There’s another reason that goats are attractive, at least from a writer’s perspective. The goat world possesses its own charismatic language. There is, of course, the goat kid: the only young animal to have bequeathed its name to human children. Goat kids can be further broken down into doelings, bucklings, and goatlings. (Try adding that suffix to any monosyllabic word, and you’ll find it instantly becomes 50 percent cuter.) Elegantly, their parents are the female doe and the male buck. Beats the hell out of cow and bull, one of which is frequently used pejoratively and the other of which is typically followed by “shit.” Ewe, ram, and lamb are similarly dull.

  And I haven’t even touched on the verbs. A goat giving birth and commencing lactation is said to “freshen.” (Try that one out on a pregnant woman: “Baby, don’t think of it as labor; you’re just freshening.”) Therefore, first-time mothers are “first fresheners”; after freshening, they’re also called “senior does.”

  Prepositions assume new importance. A kid’s pedigree is described as “out of” the dam, “by the” sire. As in, Ginger is out of Gravenstein Apple by Guy Noir, who is out of Raven. So in one sentence, you have ascertained the two most important parts of her pedigree: her parents, and her paternal grandparents. The paternal granddam is particularly important because the most important part of a dairy goat is her udder—and since bucks don’t have udders, the potential worth of a sire is tied to his mother’s name and reputation, until such time as he has produced enough show-winning daughters to stand on his own.

  And of course, while cows are bovines and sheep are ovines, goats are caprines. The word capers right into “capricious,” an adjective that helps explain why both human and goat children came to be referred to as kids. Goat kids and human kids share that unique attention span that is at times nonexistent and at others entirely persistent. Ginger, once she discovers the presence of chicken feed in the chicken coop, will devote her life to trying to get at it. Like the child who has to be read Goodnight Moon every free moment for months on end, Ginger seizes every opportunity she has to escape from the pasture and beeline it for the coop. But try getting a goat or a child to do what you want and, if it’s not what they want, you’ll find the sensation akin to repeatedly thwacking your head against a wall. In short order, Emmett and I trained our dog Kea to jump up only on command (“Dance!”). But when we attempted to convince a doeling not to jump up on us, it was like playing whack-a-mole. We pushed the goat off. We gently rapped her on the nose. And like clockwork, her adorable little cloven hooves popped right back up, stamping our thighs in mud and mashed-up goat pellets. (Ah, goat pellets. Another reason that goats beat the heck out of cows. Like sheep, they defecate in convenient, inoffensive, dry pellets.)

  A Saanen, the Holstein of the goat world, can produce seventeen pounds of milk per day, while a highly productive Nigerian might produce five. And although you might think that more milk is better, that’s not necessarily true for the home goat keeper unless he or she happens to have swine to feed all the extra milk to. And there’s a difference in milk quality, too, which is important for the home cheese maker. The Nigerian’s milk has the highest butterfat content of any of the dairy goats, so there is less whey byproduct.

  Which reminds me, I haven’t yet gotten around to making that chèvre—but that’s something I could get into.

  Ginger was quickly followed by Sedona, Pippi, Calamari, Zoe, Tuxedo, E squared (Emily and Elizabeth, purchased as prenamed adults), and our aspiring herd sire, Gobi. Aspiring because when he came home, Gobi weighed just a few pounds, his testicles were the size of peanuts, and based on an embarrassing accident perpetrated on my lap on the three-hour drive home—he managed to diarrhea all over me as soon as we pulled away from his farm—it was amply clear that he wasn’t going to be seeing much action anytime soon.

  “You brought home another one that needs a bottle?” Emmett asked, shaking his head. “I thought they were all going to be weaned.”

  Surprise!

  “And wait a second. How many goats do you have in the car? You said you were only getting three.”

  Surprise!

  “Four. But this one reminded me of Tux.”

  Word to the wise: never buy animals while in a state of grief. To do so is to ensure that common sense will be subsumed by the desire to fill aching voids with adorable creatures. A couple of weeks before bringing home our new goats, we left for the weekend to attend Emmett’s cousin’s wedding ceremony. It was an agonizing decision: although I wanted to accompany Emmett to the wedding, leaving the animals—and the vegetables—in the care of someone else is stressful. We provided our caretakers with written and verbal instructions, physical demonstrations, and reminded them multiple times to check under the porch for eggs and broody chickens who’d been trying to spend the night down there. And then, after shelling out fifty dollars per night for the service, we worried about the farm the entire time we were gone.

  When we arrived back home at midnight—after a fivehour flight and an hour-long drive from the airport—we went straight to the coop to check on the girls. Hope? Check. Joy? Check. Two Wyandottes? Check. Tux? I ran my hand over every single chicken in the coop, climbing into the back corners to see if for some reason she was there instead of on her usual perch in the front. But Tux was missing. We spent two and a half hours with flashlights searching for her in the dark and calling her name. I was crying even before Emmett found her wings, head, and feet—the spine there, too, but the torso skinned and disemboweled—across the road in the vineyard. We buried her that night.

  The caretakers hadn’t collected a huge pile of eggs that were beneath the porch—which would have further persuaded broody Tux to try sitting on them overnight instead of returning to the coop, where she would have been protected from predators—and clearly failed to follow verbal and written instructions.

  Emmett felt terrible. This had been my worst fear before leaving for the wedding. So he couldn’t exactly begrudge me a black goat with a little white star on her head who followed me around like a puppy dog and climbed into my lap.

  Life with seven kids quickly settled into sweet, comforting farm routine. I quickly learned their language—the “mehh” that meant, “Hi, mom!” or the “MEH!” that meant, “More alfalfa, please, we’re out!” I could tell them apart by the sounds of their voices—Tuxedo’s shrill urgency, which hovered somewhere between a yodel and a bleat, Pippi’s piercing whine, Sedona’s reserved, polite call.

  They progressed quickly into puberty, and before I knew it, the girls were humping each other while, in a separate pasture, Gobi watched them and licked his penis. When we placed Elizabeth in the pasture with him, she was approximately twice his size, and Gobi seemed to prefer watching the doelings hump each other to mating with Mrs. Robinson. We were eager for him to impregnate a female goat, because we wanted to start milking as soon as possible.

  And then one day, a fascinating awakening took place before our eyes, or at least before Emmett’s eyes. I was at work—I had taken an office job to fund our off-season investments in seeds and livestock—when I received an e-mail entitled “In other bright news.” Emmett typically writes in grammatically correct sentences, and he’s not normally prone to graphic description of any sort, so this e-mail was rather out of character.

  Sedona, Tuxedo, and Gobi. This photo
sums up Tuxedo’s personality perfectly.

  “Gobi just jizzed all over the place. He had a look of pure ecstasy on his face but he missed his target.”

  To which I responded, “Where was the target at the moment of lift-off?”

  “She was forward and to the right,” Emmett wrote. “He tried to mount her twice, but bounced off both times. The first time got his winky excited. And the second time when he landed it just went shooting all over, and he arched his head up with his lips curled back and quivering and his teeth exposed, saying to himself, thank you God. By the way, she seems interested now, they were doing funny vibrating tongue things at each other.”

  Upon my return, I watched Gobi try to mate with Elizabeth. He thrust forward and then fell backward, twisting in an attempt to land on his feet. I thought about placing a box behind Elizabeth, for him to step up on, but I was afraid it might ruin the moment. Also, it would have been creepy.

  You might think it’s sick, but trust me, if you had goats, you’d watch them having sex, too. First of all, it’s important to know when breeding has taken place: goat kids should arrive 145 days after copulation, and the human midwife must be ready to help out. And second of all, it’s like your very own, real-life Discovery Channel. We don’t have television, and it’s these little hilarities that I miss every moment I’m away from the farm.

  There’s one thing about the farm that’s a little bit terrifying. Somehow the days start to race down a runway and soar up over me—and suddenly little Tuxedo, the coltish black fuzzball, has twin doelings of her own and the udder to match. So does her best friend, Sedona, who is and always will be the prima donna of the herd. Long, elegant, and refined—“very dairy,” as goat people would say—she’s a movie star and she knows it. But she’s no longer standing on the roof of the goat house arching her long neck and basking in the admiration of her herd and her humans: she’s too busy admiring her own two doe kids, one of whom is a perfect miniature of herself, the other an exact (but feminine) replica of the father. Ginger, who once shared a bottle with Gobi—and has missed him since he was separated off from the females; they often flirt through the fence—is now pregnant by him, expecting mini-Gobis of her own.