MIT

JSL was a professor at MIT in those days. He often took the Wellesley College shuttle bus in, so I'd drive him to it, about 5 miles from our house. Other times he took the car all the way through Wellesley to the MTA station in Newton, and then rode the Green Line downtown and tranferred to the Red Line, which would take him to Kendall Square. It was at least an hour each way.

MIT was an interesting place. Everyone there was of course the brightest of the bright. The professors taught intense classes, and did intense research, and many did consulting for corporations besides. In fact, MIT arranged it so that every professor worked 4 days a week, leaving the 5th for consulting.

And they paid according, about 80% of the salary a high-quality professor might earn at another prestigious university, or even at a state school.

So JSL often was away on consulting trips. And that left me with the goats and the milking and the chauffeuring and shopping and cooking and gardening, and the three children and dogs and cats. But the extra income made his trips worth every effort. And except for when the heat was horrible, I managed ok. And the kids were helpful and cost-effective and supportive.

But the consulting began to dry up with the wretched economy. He was home more often, and that was a great help, but the diminishing income drained us in pocketbook and spirit. We began to despair.

And now in the fall of 1977, with our oldest child 11 and starting 6th grade, our thoughts turned to college expenses, and we realized we were in big trouble. The University of Massachusetts would just not do, but what else could we manage? We had 7 years to put away enough money for the first child, and the second was just a year behind him. And at that moment we were not putting anything away, we were just barely keeping a hold of our house.

MIT did have a plan for teachers' kids: they would pay half the expenses at any accredited institution in the country. It was just a matter of coming up with the thousands of dollars we would need for the other half.

And that seemed as likely as the economy improving. The very thought left us feeling hopeless.

1977

Harvest

As the end of August arrived, we had a better mix of heat and cool, including a few truly chilly mornings. Maples were showing signs of turning to fall colors. And young goats were coming into heat.

Meanwhile, we were enjoying a bounty from the garden. Tomatoes were inundating us, as were zucchini. Our favorite bounty, though, came in the form of purply shiny-skinned eggplant, which we used at virtually every meal but breakfasts.

There was of course fufarah, now full of green peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and big chunks of eggplant. We also had eggplant sandwiches made of fried eggplant slices, goat cheese, and fresh-picked lettuce. But perhaps our favorite was babaganoush, a mixture of cooked eggplant and sesame tahini, mixed with lemon juice, garlic, and a bit of salt. The fact that all this sumptuous eating was for free was hard to comprehend.

Another garden treat was jerusalem artichokes. We had discovered these in the food boxes we got each week from the coop, and though it was expensive to plant them instead of eat them, we were reward by a long row of tall sunflower-like stalks with small flowers on top. And all we had to do to add a sunchoke to the meal was to dig about their roots and pull up as many as we wanted.

We had to learn a few tricks about cooking them: to saute them in oil takes a while, until they give up and soften, then brown. Before they brown, they taste like oysters, while afterward more like potatoes. They could also be steamed and eaten like potatoes, or mixed with potatoes and mashed. But our potatoes were still in the ground, and we were happy enough to cut the sunchokes in discs or strips and add them early to the pot that would sooner or later contain all the components of fufarah.

So we ate well. A slice of our beloved pure-white goat cheese went on the top of almost everything. There was never a food as glorious as our homemade whole-wheat bread toasted, a thick slice of tomato still hot from the garden added along with lettuce, the bread spread with butter or good mayonnaise, and then goat cheese in its 1x3 inch slices aligned across the top so that a knife-cut would not disturb it. It was a bit messy to eat, but accompanied by mint 'tea', it made a 100% satisfying lunch. Or we'd just eat it in hand, or crumbled into fufarah or onto a garden salad.

So harvest brought a lot of joy, and it was just beginning.

1977.

Much to think about

By the end of August my thoughts were full of four pressing and painful issues:

1. What to do about the neighbor Nancy.
2. The meaning of my father's passing.
3. Whether to try for another baby and risk more sorrow.
4. Money.

Money was the constant theme. How to survive, really. The economy was a mess: inflation was upwards toward 20% a year, more in some spheres. Taxes were up and up, as were groceries and gas. Everything but our income, which was not tied into the cost of living. We were slowly slipping into financial doom.

As for Nancy, I held a lot of affection for her in my heart. I thought she could be a neat friend. The strange things she had said and done were mysteries to me, and didn't stick well to her in my mind. I thought maybe it was all due to her husband, who was a strange character we seldom saw. He had set up a leather-working shop in the old carriage house, but when the kids were over there playing, they never saw him do anything but lie on the couch he'd moved in there. So as thoughts of Nancy went round and round in my mind, I alternated between feeling mystifed and loving. Very confusing. As for what I might do to ensure the better outcome, I had no idea.

My father's death caused me primarily to think more of my mother's welfare. She seemed happy enough, and in one way we were all relieved: she had much more freedom to come and go and visited us much more frequently, sleeping in our family room off the kitchen, where the kids loved to visit her. Of course she was not confined there but she carved out a little niche in that spare room and often had her knitting out and a cookie for the kids. So his loss was not ours, not in any immediate way.

But then there was the loss of my little ones. The tiny body I had held after my body ejected it caused a constant underlying ripple in my awareness still, after nearly a year, and that was just the first. I had wanted a large family, and somehow I was failing to fulfill that dream. I had failed to provide 9 months of nurture for these two eagerly awaited new members of our family while they built their little earthly homes deep inside of me, and it all seemed so wrong. The emptiness was filled with the doctor's ringing voice: you will never bear another child.

But I didn't feel that way. I really felt I could bring a new baby into the world, as I had 3 times before.

I was still in the 6 months of rest that doctor's partner had recommended before I should try again, that tumultuous late August, so I didn't need to make any decisions. But it weighed on me like poverty and loneliness and death.

So my mind was filled with much to think about, and my heart stood on the precipice of deep pain. There was nothing to do but keep doing, and loving those whose care I had successfully found myself entrusted with. Time would do something with all this...

1977.

Goat bread

So we had a boarder who contributed cash, and we had all our own milk for free because we sold enough to pay all the goat-related bills. 

We also had the veggies growing taller and more robust in the garden, with the promise of an excellent harvest and food available without cost well into the winter, and maybe through till Spring.

The only costs were the time and energy it took to weed and keep an eye out for bugs, and to continue to remove the rocks that seemed to grow right along with the veggies. Fortunately there were not many bugs.

To round out the early mid-summer menu, while we were waiting for the bulk of the produce to be ready, we ate a lot of goat bread.

It seems that the major bakeries, such as Pepperidge Farm, had outlet stores where anyone could go and pick up day-old bread. And then when some of it hadn't sold, after about a week, goat people (and others with animals) could go and get it. What was left was the really old bread, stale, often in ripped bags, sometimes moldy - 100 pounds for $5. Five cents a pound.

That was considerably less than the cost of goat feed, and in some cases approximated their feed in quality. Of course we never fed them the moldy bread, so there was some waste. But for the most part, the ability to buy goat bread really helped the feed bills.

We'd go to the back door of the store, off the alley, and back up with the station wagon, then go in and take from the shelves in the store's back room whatever looked good to us, 100# at a time. We all helped pitch it into the car. Then we'd drive home and back up to the bulkhead and carry it down to the freezer, to be thawed several loaves at a time for each feeding.

The goats loved it. They'd grab a slice or two as we held it out to them, gobble it down, and come back for more. Their favorite was cinnamon raisin...

And if they refused a slice, we knew it wasn't wholesome, even if it looked ok to us.

Of course it didn't take us long to start eating the bread ourselves, and that meant we could save several dollars a week, with bread $1 a loaf.

So we made it through the early Summer while we watched the garden grow.

a little the help from our friends...

The financial pressure hadn't abated. And then one night a win-win solution popped into our awareness, something that had been there all along...

We had gone as a family to the TM center for a pot-luck supper and a video. At the back of the room was a man we had met a few times. He was looking for a place to live.

And we had the downstairs bedroom, with its own half-bath.

And he could pay a few hundred dollars a month. In short order we had made our arrangement, and he moved in the next day.

The money was welcome. And he added to it by bringing fruits and lebneh and other foods from his native Palestine. He taught us to enjoy many Middle Eastern dishes as well. 

Our big house was capable of housing one more. And so we backed away from the precipice of financial disaster and began to breathe again.

Chicks!

We were pretty overwhelmed with the goats, but we knew chickens, ducks, horses, any farm animal with the exception of pigs (John had had to drive by a pig farm as a kid), would be in our future. 

One solution was to start with some broilers, and just raise them in the good old garage, the garage that had already housed goats. Then we could put them in the freezer and be done with them, without having to have a hen house.

So I poured over chicken catalogs. I didn't know there were such things, but a goat friend shared one with me...

Of course cost was a big issue, and it was tempting to buy LOTS of chicks so the cost each would be less. 

I tried to interest friends in sharing the load. But in the end we were on our own. So we ordered 30 chicks. 

I couldn't imagine how they'd come mail order, but the day arrived and a mailman drove up the driveway with a single low box of peeps, tiny beaks sticking out of the airholes.

I had made a small pen in the garage, coverd the floor under it with shavings, and set up a heat lamp in a box, plus a watering bucket and a feed dish. I had bought the right kind of feed for baby chicks and it was waiting in their dish.

So all I had to do was pour in the chicks and watch.

They were yellow fluff, and the tips of their wings were beginning at this age of one day, to turn white and stiff - real feathers. 

They went right to work drinking water. Every one was healthy. They pecked at food, ran in to the box, out again, plunked down and slept, and repeated it all. I was caught up in watching them and could hardly draw myself away. The kids loved them when they got off the bus...

So they grew. Every day they were whiter and less fluffy. They began to look like adolescents, gawky and squawky instead of peepy. 

I could see how they would be ready to eat in 6 or 8 weeks. They were bred to be eating machines. They ate enormous amounts of feed, going from one sack of grain in the first week to several sacks a week toward the end...

We 'harvested' them in late June, when they were fat, by catching them by the necks and tossing them into the burlap feed sacks our goat feed came in. We cut slots in the bags and placed them in the back of the station wagon. By the time we got all 30 handfuls into the bags, most of the holes had heads sticking out. 

Then I drove them down to the packing house and returned that night to pick up 30 naked broilers in plastic bags. I don't know where those little yellow balls of fluff went...

And the plastic bags went into the freezer and we cooked them two at a time all Summer and early Fall.

No such thing as a free goat...

As we went to goat shows and saw the truly beautiful animals being shown there, I began to appreciate the elements that made up that beauty, and I began to see what 'dogs' our goats were.

Of course we just wanted goats for milk, so what did it matter?

What we had failed to appreciate in the beginning was the small issue of the need to breed milkers every year so they would continue to produce milk.

The normal cycle was annual: Starting at a year, a young doe had her first kid. That meant she was bred at 7 months. She would produce milk for the next 10 months, the last three of which were when she was pregnant with her next batch of kids. After that her supply diminished to almost nothing, and her owner would dry her up and give her a rest for the last two months before the next batch of babies was born a year after the first. 

Let's say she has her first kid or kids on March 1. She is then in milk until the following Jan 1, and gets a rest until the next March 1 when she has a new batch of kids. She would have been bred on Oct 1.

Some few goats can produce for more than 10 months, but the rule of thumb is that they need to be 'freshened' every year. 

The by-product of this freshening is baby goats. One the first year, two or three or four or five thereafter. 

In a dairy with 5 milkers, that would mean something like 15 babies, half doelings.

Newborn does can be raised to make more milkers, sold to someone else for that purpose, or eaten. Newborn bucks generally must be eaten, though some are sold as pets.

Leaving aside the unfortunate young males, there are usually still more little does than a dairy needs to replace the mature milkers, who produce well for at least 5 years.

So they need to be sold. And if the dairy is a business, they need to be sold at a profit, or at least at break-even.

So this is the situation we faced: we had many small does, and it would have been great to pay some of our bills by selling them. 

And of course our goat-people friends were trying to do the same thing.

And that's where shows came in. It was a place to show off one's gorgeous goats, and it was a place to get ribbons that proved the goat was gorgeous.

And after a few shows I realized we did not have gorgeous goats. Nice ones, milky ones, but not good-lookers. 

It could be argued that the looks of a goat have nothing to do with the ability to produce milk. But it's not so: each aspect of a great-looking goat has to do with the ability to produce. These traits define dairy-goat beauty.

So when we didn't win ribbons, we didn't sell goats.

A lot of our first goats were very low cost, or FREE. They made good milk. They didn't win ribbons. They made as many babies as other goats, and they ate as much as other goats. We just couldn't sell their babies.

And that's when I realized there's no such thing as a free goat.

Interlude: John gets a job

John had a big decision to make and then we could go on our first camping trip.

We had owned the equipment for 8 months or so, and had yet to get away and really camp.

Meanwhile Margo had been born. Then it was winter. Then the final typing (with a typewriter!) of the dissertation, all the while waiting for word about jobs and our future.

The offers trickled in over the Spring of 1968. The first was from JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, NASA's lead center for planetary exploration. A great job! We decided to go to Pasadena and see if we would thrive there as a family.

Then came an offer from two departments at MIT, back in home turf since we had both grown up in the Northeast. The Chemistry department and Geology and Geophysics put together a joint offer that would cover all his areas of expertise.

And then an offer came from the University of Oregon to found a new planetary sciences department with colleagues already established in space sciences. The offer involved the geology and chemistry departments and the Center for Vulcanology, and some involvement with the astronomy department. 

Our trip to Pasadena helped us eliminate JPL right away. The smog was intense and we found ourselves lying on the floor with no energy. JPL's offer included the most money, but we rejected it for reasons having to do with our ability to stay alive in that environment.

(Smog in those days was a much bigger problem than it is now. A pall of chemicals rested over most of the major cities in those days, especially LA.)

So it came down to MIT and the University of Oregon. One established, the other growing. One with a huge reputation, the other striving for one. One with an urban/suburban flavor, the other in a big small town. One home, the other away. One without a touch of wilderness, the other right in it.

We could go camping as soon as he decided. Everything that happened in our lives after that would depend on the decision. It was a decision that would affect John's profession and who we all became over the next 60 years....

We put our heads together. And in the end, he chose MIT, and then we went on our first big camping trip. 

Vacation!

When the first hints of uncomfortable heat came every Spring, we began to think of vacation.

Vacations had been an important part of every Summer. We'd always headed North to get out of the heat...

The Spring of 1977, our first one the farm, was no different. 

But then we looked at each other. 

There was no money.

Gas prices were at an all-time high.

There was no time.

There was no one who could take care of the goats and the garden.

There would be no vacation. Not as long as we ran a farm.

So why not sell some goats!??!!!

As the feed bills piled up, and as I got to know my fellow goat people, I realized that a big part of the goat game was selling goats.

That is different from having goats for milk only, but it is a real necessity if you don't want to end up with 10,000 goats. They have to be 'freshened' every year, and that always entailed babies.

Sure, it was possible to sell the doelings as well as the bucklings for meat, but it was also the difference of about $75 in the income from them if they were sold as lovely little milkers-to-be. 

But with everyone having an abundance of kids in the spring, how would I be able to get them to choose mine?

This question had already been answered many times over: have the best doelings.

And since there was nothing much but pure cuteness to see in a baby, that meant going by the breeding. Like mother - like daughter. Or like sister - like sister. If the mother produced a lot of milk, or if she had characteristics associated with producing a lot of milk, her kids would have an advantage in the marketplace. And likewise if the father had produced a lot of great kids who went on to be good dairy animals, his other daughters would have a leg up. So to speak. 

And how would anyone know these things? Through milk testing and shows.

So that's what we faced that busy busy Spring of 1977: goat testing and showing.

Goat testing consists of a once-a-month visit from someone in your test group, made up a other people in the area who signed up for cooperative testing. She came one evening and the next morning, and watched you milk, weighed the milk, and took a sample of it for fat content. Then you did the same for someone else, on a rotation basis within your group.

The sample was then sent to a Department of Agriculture lab for analysis.

A good dairy animal consistently produced a large volume of milk with a high fat content. So good results on the tests meant a good reputation when it came to selling kids. Like mother - like daughter.

I jumped right in to testing. Our group consisted of about 7 or 8 family farms around the southwestern part of the outskirts of suburban Boston. The closest farm was about 7 miles away, the farthest more like 15 or 18. We'd drive down in the evening, be there while they milked all their goats, drive home, and drive down again the next morning and watch again. In the winding, twisting roads of rural Massachusetts, the drive could take 45 minutes each way for the longer distances.

I always took one or more children with me in the evening, but couldn't in the morning because of school. 

Some people milked at 6 pm, which was still light, but then at 6 am it was not that great. Still, it was fun to visit with the goat people. Others milked later, maybe 8 pm, which meant getting home close to 10 after driving on VERY dark rural roads!

Then a day or so later someone would come watch me milk and measure and sample.

We were the only family with young children on the milk-testing circuit, and I soon could see why: it ate up a lot of family time. And often we would still have our chores to do when we got home.

Testing is a good thing. It keeps us all honest with regard to the overall output of our operations: if the milk was not flowing in abundance, something needed to be changed. Or if the butterfat were low, same thing. And when someone came shopping for a goat, it looked impressive that we were on test.

On the other hand, if the test results were not good, testing wasn't going to sell any goats except to inexperienced shoppers.

So testing was potentially useful, once we got a track record - if the results were good. We thought our goats were great! But we didn't really know...

Stacking up the challenges

In April 1977 we were done with the birth of new babies, and had the chore of feeding them all. It was fun. But it had to be done 3 times a day. (It did taper off to 2 in May...)

The food wasn't up and edible yet, and wouldn't be for a couple more months. That meant we were eating from the store. And that meant the finances were getting scary.

And looking at the total number of does we suddenly had, with all the babies, we realized we had more mouths to feed than before, and the feed bill was already high.

It is expensive to raise a doeling from newborn till she starts producing a year or so later. She eats and grows and eats and grows, then gets bred, then eats and grows...

And we had 6.

So the bills were accumulating for feed and hay, and aside from the milk we could drink and sell, and the bucklings we had sold, nothing was coming in.

And it was stressful.

The interesting thing is that at no time did we decide to call it quits. The long-term outlook was good...

That was our thinking: sell milk and goats, eat from the garden, later have chickens and maybe ducks and geese and turkeys....

And we knew that this was a wholesome way to raise a family, and learning self-sufficiency seemed very important. With double-digit inflation and high gas prices, the national economy didn't seem as thought it could be trusted.

So in our minds our little project was full speed ahead.

But in our guts we experienced a fair amount of stress.

There was no question we were living a dream, but it verged on a nightmare every so often.

And I was having stress headaches, or possibly migraines, every 3 days, and that definitely took some of the fun out. Sick headaches that meant that lights and sounds were intolerable...

Still, I was happily pregnant with the baby due in November, and I felt really competent being able to carry 100 pound sacks of grain and do other heavy labor when I didn't have the headaches.

I was able to earn a little teaching TM residence courses, and every penny helped.

John was away at scientific conferences fairly often, and I found it stressful to have the three children, the six kids, and the five mother goats all to myself to care for. 

That's not actually fair to the children: they milked every morning and night, and did a fair share of chores. I was just feeling a lot of ultimate responsibility on my shoulders, and they didn't seem as much up to that task as they were to carrying the feed sacks.

But the days were warming up, bringing cheery thoughts with them as well as green shoots in the garden. We were ever optimistic. We never once questioned...

Interlude: Early gardens we had known

John and I had both had some experience with veggie gardens, and we remembered them fondly. These small plots on land our families had owned 30 years before may have been part of the reason we were so keen on growing our own food.

My first garden was created by my mother during World War II at the back of our yard. At first we had a lawn than ran down to the edge of the lawn of the boy who lived behind us. Then my mother protected our property by building a post and rail fence across the back. Later came the garden, across much of the width of the yard, and up against the fence.

It was a Victory Garden. Americans were encouraged during the war to do their duty by helping raise food, whether they lived in the country or the city. I remember my mother digging and harvesting when I was about 2. 

Later after the war my mother turned the garden back into sod. Maybe it had been such hard work that she didn't want to continue, or maybe there was just a sense that the war was over and it was time to return to normal life.

My Uncle Ed, already in his 60s by the time I came on the scene, also gardened. He lived in Hartford, and kept a garden that fed the family consisting of him, my grandparents, and his sister. Their parents before them had certainly had a garden at their home in Hartford, and my grandfather's family even had a cow right there in the city. The generation before them had lived in Ireland, and there they had a garden or succumbed. I looked at that garden with curiosity and was told to stay out of it.

We moved next to Darien CT where my father taught school. We had a flat backyard and my mother immediately set about scratching away the grass and planting. I was 6 or 7 and was not only able to give her a hand, she allowed me to do much of the planting and harvesting. I don't know whether she wanted to grow veggies then to help balance the budget, or just because a garden had been part of her childhood. I remember harvesting kohlrabi and green beans.

We moved four more times in quick succession, partly because my father was called up again due to the outbreak of fighting in Korea. It wasn't until I was nearly 11 that we moved into our final family home. 

It seemed natural to me to start a garden. I couldn't interest my mother in the project, but I got our old shovel and rake and started to work. 

I had a hard time of it because of roots and rocks. And the yard was fairly shady out there in the back. So in the end I just had a small garden and not much produce.

Meanwhile John's family had worked together in the yard every sunny weekend and a flower garden plus some vegetables was the standard for the family. I don't think there was a time when they didn't have a garden, even when they lived in New Hampshire with its short summers or in Massachusetts where they had a tiny yard. His father did the manual labor, and his mother, who had grown up on a farm, supported the project as the best way to feed the family.

When we had our first home, we set about putting in some plants, such as peas next to the back door we had in Lexington. It was in one of the few sunny spots. When we got to Wellesley the yard was on a slope and again quite shady, and I built up the downhill end with boards and carried some dirt in from the woods to build up the soil. I struggled to grow beets and spinach there without much success. 

And then we moved to the farm. We had all this behind us, and were ready to get our hands dirty.

Saving (or earning) money with goats?

At this point we had spent a lot of money on the goats, their barn, their feed, their straw, and various pieces of equipment. But we had not seen a lot of income from them.

By early April 1977 we were having all our dairy needs fulfilled. As a family we were drinking a gallon or more of this good fresh unpasteurized unhomogenized frothy pure-white goat milk per day, and we had lots left over, even after the babies finished with their share.

It was time to make that goat milk pay.

The first idea was to store it in the tried and true traditional method, which is to make it into cheese. That gave us cheese to eat and meant we didn't have to buy it at the store, and we were heavy cheese eaters. One gallon of extra milk meant one wheel of cheese, or about the amount we could eat in a day. Recipes for what to do with it are on GrammyPeg's Kitchen.

But cheese could not be an income making venture at that time. Goat cheese had yet to be discovered as something an intelligent person would pay good money for.

So I decided to look into selling milk. In Massachusetts at that time, it could be sold only from the door, so I would need to lean on word of mouth advertising or the milk would not be going anywhere.

But that turned out not to be a problem. The word did spread. Some people wanted it for sick babies, others for sick animals, others just because they liked it. We sold all we could produce, and we knew we could have sold more. We bottled it in half gallon juice bottles and our customers needed to bring the bottles back clean. They paid us $2 per half gallon.

Since we were selling all we had to spare, the milk going down the throats of rapidly growing babies began to look like an asset going to waste. We were happy to have our doelings consume it so they could grow big and produce milk of their own, but the bucklings that were named Hamburger 1, Hamburger 2, etc. were a different story.

So I decided to see if I could sell them.

Of course all goat people have an excess of bucklings at the same time of year. I tried to get the word out by using a wonderful little weekly sales booklet that allowed us to put in ads for free and pay 10% when we sold the item.That fit my budget perfectly! It circulated all over the eastern half of the state. But no one called for our kids. And I didn't want to feed them milk I could sell. In any case, I couldn't keep them, and as vegetarians we weren't going to eat them...

So I mulled over how to change my success, and one morning I woke up with a new ad to try. Instead of saying Goat Kid For Sale, I submitted, "Bottle feed your own baby goat".

I sold all of them that weekend.

The people buying them had a choice of what to feed them. Some opted to wean them to hay, some to milk replacer (an awful concoction that purports to be like milk but everyone knows from looking at it that it bears no resemblance to anything like milk), and some to, tada! goat's milk! Which they would have to buy from me...

I castrated the young bucks before they went so they would remain small and friendly.

We sold all the goat milk we weren't drinking. And so the goats started to pay for themselves and all our milk and whatever cheese we had the milk to make.

What we ate in the meantime...

Looking back at this point, we recalled that the economy of this little farm depended on growing our own food. Otherwise it would be unaffordable because even back then with 3 children we were spending $500 at the grocery store, and that was $500 we no longer had once we got the new tax bill.

The garden couldn't be hurried, though, and wouldn't be able to feed us even simple greens until June, 9 months after we had bought the property.

So I thought long and hard about how to save money on food.

Buying ingredients instead of prepared foods was a step we had partially taken a few years before. So instead of buying prepared beans, we soaked and cooked our own, saving about 60% of the cost. Or instead of eating cold cereal, with its high cost per ounce, we had oatmeal. Gradually I came to buy most of our food in bulk, and since I had always cooked, I enjoyed converting it into wonderful, inexpensive dishes.

The bulk purchases included many varieties of beans. We loved black turtle bean soup, and its cost was less than $1 for all of us. I cooked lentil soup often, maybe once a week, and it too was a huge budget balancer. See GrammyPeg's Kitchen for recipes.

I also bought grains in bulk. We had wheat, rye, grinding corn, barley, whatever was on sale.

Of course I made bread and various whole-grain biscuits and cookies, and I also made a dinner porridge that we called Tablespoon Soup.

We had been verging on vegetarianism for a while, and that helped balance the budget. We could barter goat's milk for eggs, and so we had plenty of those. And we had the milk.

Gradually I built up a good collection of bulk foods, and we had a lot of variety. There were two foods we never skimped on, though: we always bought real butter and plenty of ice cream.

And of course before the garden produced veggies, we had to buy those.

It was still expensive for us all to eat. And so I had to figure out other ways to ameliorate some of our financial woes, and for that I turned back to the goats.

The barn: Part 1, planning...

It was no surprise to us that we would need a barn. We would build it ourselves.

(When I say 'we', I mean dear husband John S Lewis Jr, author and professor does it. When I say 'I', I mean I do it. Usually I say 'we' when it's a doing thing.)

We designed it to give us the greatest capacity indoors with the least materials. This is a simple calculus problem that should cause no pain or strain to anyone. The idea was to save money. Always to save money!

The calculation we did was to find the greatest floor area using the least amount of building materials, given the number of goats we wanted to house. We needed to include the milkers and the kids. We didn't think we wanted to have our own buck - there were plenty around - and in any case he would have had to be housed separately.

We already had 3 does, which could have meant as many, reasonably speaking, as 7 babies. Figure 15 sf per doe and half that per baby, and it would come out to 70 or 80 sf. The milk room would need to be added to that. But that was a pretty skimpy barn, only 130 sf or so, or 10x13. We also had to have enough loft space for hay. So we rounded up to what seemed like a reasonable size for whatever eventuality, 12x24.

The barn needed:

1. A people door.

2. A goat door for kids.

3. A milk room (a place to do the milking, not handle the milk), with a light.

4. Feed troughs.

5. A door for the does, big enough to scoop out the poop through.

6. A loft for storing hay.

The 288 sf barn, taking out 54 sf for the milkroom, left us with 234 sf for goats. We would be all set for 15 mature does, or 8 does and 14 babies, or some such combination. Plenty!

The one big door would need to face west, for afternoon sunshine in the winter and for removing soiled bedding. It could be just a doorway - we didn't anticipate closing it even in bad weather because the goats needed it for ventilation.

The one door close to the milk room was to let people in to feed and do the milking.

The kid door would let the babies out into their special fenced area, which would have climbing toys and plenty of space to run and jump.

And we added to our plans another door to the south in case we wanted to use two pastures for the adults, sometime in the future. .

The milk room would be about 9x6, situated at the near end of the barn. The people door would open into the barn, then a gate a open into the milk room. Along the outside of the milkroom were the feeding troughs, which would hold flakes of hay for continuous eating during the day. Another gate would separate the goats from the little corridor that allowed people to come and go without the bumping and nudging of the goat ladies.

The roof would be sloped because of the inevitable snow load, and the ceiling would be a comfortable height for people and to take advantage of the size of lumber.

The ceiling formed a loft, and had to be low and strong enough for storing a ton of hay above it. And it needed a hole for climbing up into the loft.

The dimensions were calculated based on 4x8 sheets of plywood and 8 foot lengths of 2x4. Thus the sides were 8 feet tall; the narrow ends were 3 sheets of plywood wide, while the sides were 6 sheets wide, minus sheets not needed for the door openings. The doors saved almost 5 sheets of plywood, the remainder needed for trimming.

The doors would be made of scrap lumber and 2x4s.

The sills would be supported with concrete footers spaced every 4 feet, with breathing space of about 6 inches below the sills for ventilation, the depth depending on the terrain.

The electric conduit that was plugged in at the house would end in the milkroom. An outlet would be attached for the plugs from the fence charger and the lamp we would milk by on dark winter nights.

This simple barn would take care of all our needs. We would store the grain in the garage where we could unload it from our station wagon. Water would be delivered to drinking buckets by a hose when temperatures were above freezing, or carried in pails from the house. It wasn't fancy, but it was relatively low cost, completely sturdy, and attractive. And we knew the goats would love it.

Self-sufficiency

When we started out, we just wanted to grow our own food, for two reasons I think: It was deeply compelling for unknown reasons, and we wanted to save trips to the store. In the beginning, that was a matter of convenience. Later it was a financial necessity.

Long gas lines and high prices were only a couple of years behind us. That may have fed into our desire not waste gas only to end up in grocery stores buying blah manufactured food.

Plus, beginning in 1971, I had studied healthy living at the feet of my life-mentor, Kay Ferguson. She just naturally had a garden, and fed her family out of it every night. I learned about what I was serving my family, and watched her techniques as she prepared veggies, salads, brown rice in her cast iron pot.

Her garden was full of all sorts of veggies. It was beautiful. When she moved to a new house, one of the first projects was getting in the new garden.

She had grown up on a farm herself, and it was just what she did. The big difference between her and the rest of us is that she remembered how to eat, and we had all forgotten. We had taken the easy way out of buying processed cereals, hot dogs, and so on. Today's grocery selection is much worse, but we still had additives and broken foods in 1971 when I met Kay, and she had no tolerance for them.

From her I learned how to make lentil soup and stir-fried veggies, from her garden in season or from our 'organic' food coop that flew it in from California once a week. Her son Bob was just as proficient a cook and could serve up fine meals with little effort to those of us who worked with him at the TM center in Wellesley.

'Organic' was a newish word with somewhat unknown meanings to me.

A good part of what I wanted from a garden was good food. And convenient food. And self-sufficiency meant growing what we ate.

Or in reality it meant eating what we grew, but that's another story.

We had a lot of work ahead of us as we faced the unbroken sod that September. It was still only a dream beginning to become a plan. Not a half year had passed away from the first inklings of undertaking a new lifestyle. And we had taken a very big bite.

In the end, 5 years later when we moved to Tucson, we knew we could live self-sufficiently. And in between, we learned what that really meant, the hard way.

Disaster strikes...

It wasn't a housefire, no one got hurt. Instead, disaster came in a little envelope with a window.

We received our tax bill about a month after we arrived at the farm. We had stretched to buy this precious piece of land and had invested our whole selves in the concept of becoming self-sufficient. We had calculated closely and aside from buying a couple extra goats and hence needing extra feed, we were on track.

But this was 1976. Inflation was out of sight, rising to 10% not long after we moved in, and 12% soon after. It was devastating.

And the City of Natick needed to raise taxes to keep up with costs. Our tax bill doubled.

When we closed on our property in August 1976, the taxes were $2600 a year, a huge amount compared to what we would have paid in most states. In fact, at that time Massachusetts was called, not affectionately, Tax-achusetts.

But then the taxes doubled. We literally were being asked to pay $5200 a year or over $400 a month. The mortgage was only around $700 a month.

Suddenly we were in a dire situation. JSL's salary at MIT of about $32,000 could barely cover the original monthly payments. He had been teaching there for 8 years, had consulted for NASA and aerospace companies, and we were still in trouble.

This was the beginning of 5 years of serious financial challenges. The rest of the story of our time on the farm, and the real reason this whole saga has relevance today, is because we had a big deficit to face, and tried lots of things, and somehow survived. And look back on it all with fondness.

The beginning...

I sat in my hotel room in Switzerland and watched a woman from a nearby home plant her garden. First she had a load of topsoil delivered, then she smoothed it meticulously, then she measured it out in blocks with her meterstick, then she changed my life.

I was there a month and by the time I left, she had planted her sets and the garden was growing. I wanted to do the same.

Half a year later, we were eating our first crops, a few greens and beans.

But first we had to buy some land...

This was only a beginning. We had so much to learn, and so many adventures ahead. It was tough, and it was satisfying. And it turned out it was our financial salvation. But we didn't know what was coming, back then in early 1976.