The Nourishing Homestead: One Back-to-the-Land Family's Plan for Cultivating Soil, Skills, and Spirit

510 Pages·2015·38.47 MB·English

by  Ben Hewitt

PRAISE FOR
The Nourishing Homestead
“Nesting deeply into a farmstead requires skill, patience, and the right
mindset. Sharing his insights after nearly two decades of this life, Ben
Hewitt beckons others to follow in his success. Are you intimidated by a
noncorporate farmstead life? The Nourishing Homestead empowers anyone
aspiring to such a life: Yes, you can.”
—Joel Salatin, farmer and author “If Walden were a how-to book and
updated for the twenty-first century, The Nourishing Homestead would be
it. Whether you have land or not, are a hardcore homesteader or a
suburban gardener, you’ll find this book packed with countless how-to
gems for personal and family liberty. The practical usefulness of this book
is hard to overstate; the Hewitts have written a manual girded by direct
experience alone, not ideology—a true rarity.”
—Ben Falk, author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead “The Nourishing
Homestead is just perfect for young families embarking on a homestead
way of life. Ben Hewitt’s approach to (and philosophy of) homestead
economics is alone worth reading the book. His views on what he defines
as ‘real food’ and ‘deep nutrition’ might rattle the reader’s brain
occasionally, but all for the good. Beyond that, the rich detail of
information on how to make small-scale farming work successfully rings
with genuine know-how and conviction.”
—Gene Logsdon, author of Gene Everlasting “Inspiring and informative. A
brilliant union of theory and practice.”
—Shannon Hayes, author of The Radical Homemaker “A wise, poetic, and
eminently practical manifesto, The Nourishing Homestead provides all the
ingredients for a nutrient-dense life. Ben and Penny Hewitt teach us how
to farm, but more importantly, why to farm. In so doing, they have seeded
nothing short of an agrarian revolution.”
—Rowan Jacobsen, author of American Terroir
and Apples of Uncommon Character

Copyright © 2015 by Ben Hewitt and Penny Hewitt.
All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright © 2015 by Ben Hewitt and Penny Hewitt.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone Developmental Editor: Makenna Goodman Copy Editor: Laura
Jorstad
Proofreader: Brianne Bardusch Indexer: Linda Hallinger
Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.
First printing January, 2015.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 16 17 18 19

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postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hewitt, Ben, 1971– author.
The nourishing homestead : one back-to-the-land family’s plan for cultivating soil, skills, and spirit
/ Ben Hewitt with Penny Hewitt.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60358-551-4 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-60358-552-1 (ebook) 1. Urban homesteading—
Vermont. I. Hewitt, Penny, author. II. Title.

HD7289.42.U62V54 2015
363.5’83—dc23
2014035895
Chelsea Green Publishing
85 North Main Street, Suite 120
White River Junction, VT 05001
[phone]
www.chelseagreen.com
Contents
1: The Evolution of Our Homestead
2: Practice and Philosophy
3: Homestead Design and Layout
4: Real Food and Deep Nutrition
5: Soil and Gardens
6: The Nourished Animal
7: Animal Slaughter and Processing
8: Infrastructure, Skills, and Tools
9: Money and “Stuff”
10: Children on the Homestead
Conclusion: What the Day Holds
Acknowledgments
Resources for Digging Deeper
Notes
About the Author
the evolution of our homestead
I live with my wife, Penny, and sons, Finlay, 12, and Rye, 9, in the
northern Vermont dairy-farming community of Cabot. You may have
heard of my hometown, but if so, it’s probably only because of the
eponymous creamery that has won numerous awards for its butter and
cheese. Cabot is a working-class town of about 1,200, and it is currently
home to a dozen family-scale dairy farms that milk anywhere from about
30 to perhaps 100 cows. Ironically, the overwhelming majority of the milk
produced in the town of Cabot doesn’t find its way into the products that
bear the town’s name; the dysfunction inherent to the dairy industry
compels most of our neighbors to sell their milk to organic distributors.
My family and I operate a highly diversified homestead on 40
southwesterly facing acres about a mile north of the village proper. Or
maybe it’s not a homestead; maybe it’s a farm. Or is it a farmstead? The
definitions of each seem so personal and malleable that I’m never really
sure what to call our place. Nor am I certain it matters. Of our 40 acres,
about 10 are in pasture, vegetable, and fruit production; the remaining 30
comprise a woodlot of typical northeastern species, plus a handful of
interlopers, riding the tide of wetter, warmer winters and the expanding
growing season. There is spruce and balsam fir, maple hard and soft.
White birch and yellow birch, elm and white ash. We have a few small
stands of red oak, something our forester assures us is quite rare for the
region, but is nonetheless “real nice to see.”
Penny and I came to this property in 1997, at the end of an
exasperating quest to find a piece of land that was suitable for growing at
least a portion—and hopefully, a rather significant portion—of our food,
and which we could afford. In isolation from each other, these were fairly
attainable goals, but when combined in the context of our modest budget
of $30,000, they seemed for a time downright unattainable. We trudged
through one 5-acre swamp after another, our boots squelching and
slurping in the muck, before picking and tripping our way across the
wounded landscapes of recent clear-cuts on the handful of parcels that
fell in our price range. Our sense of futility grew in direct proportion to the
number of unsuitable properties we were shown.
Unlike many would-be homesteaders, we weren’t fleeing stressful
careers, nor had we soured on the hurly-burly of city life. Our desire to
live in connection with the land and the natural world was merely an
extension of our lives thus far. I was born and raised in rural northern
Vermont, and although Penny’s early years were passed in the New
Jersey suburbs, she’d spent all of her adult years working on vegetable
farms, earning the dubious distinction of becoming the first in her family
to leave college in order to farm. We met on the island of Martha’s
Vineyard, where I’d gone for the winter to make a quick buck working
construction, and where she was alternately farming and digging ditches.
I mean this literally: We actually met on a construction site after she’d
been hired to dig a ditch for the sprinkler system, and from the moment
she pedaled up the job-site driveway, with a shovel and pickax strapped
to the frame of her bicycle, on a rainy January morning, I was a goner.
We’d visited a local bank and, owing to our good credit, had been pre-
approved for a low six-figure mortgage, but that would have necessitated
buying property with a house, since banks don’t like to lend unless there
is a physical structure they can reclaim. Besides which, neither of us
made more than $8 per hour at the time, although our penchant for thrift
—which among other trials included living in a tent on a friend’s land until
the first snows of early December—had enabled us to save $15,000.
According to the bank’s spreadsheets, based on calculations that eluded
our sense of logic, we could afford the monthly payment on a $100,000-
plus mortgage. Maybe the bank was right. But even if the bank was right,
it seemed wrong.
Anyway, we didn’t want to buy a house; we wanted to build one. It felt
to us like an essential part of the process, as if to properly inhabit a
home, it should be imbued with a certain amount of sweat and struggle
that could only arise from the physical act of actually putting it together,
stud by stud, nail by nail. In hindsight, I see just how fortunate and naive
we were. Fortunate because we were able to purchase land before the
real estate boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s priced it beyond our
reach, and naive because we never really considered that it might not
work out. Certainly, if we were to do it all over again today, we’d almost
certainly need to settle for less (or lesser) land, and we may not have the
luxury of eschewing debt to the extent we did.
Our desire to avoid debt has always been a motivating factor and has
often defined how our work unfolds. I’d like to say this desire originates
from some evolved consciousness regarding the mechanics of money or
how interest-bearing debt is at the core of humanity’s exploitation of the
natural world and even one another. But when it came time to buy
property, truth was much simpler: We just couldn’t imagine signing up for
30 years of monthly mortgage payments. One hundred thousand dollars
was an almost unfathomable sum to us, one that we feared would crush
us under the burden of its repayment. To us, it felt like signing away a
piece of our freedom, and although there was a brief period during which
this almost came to seem like a tenable option, if only because there
seemed to be no other tenable options, we ultimately couldn’t carry
through with it.
What did we want in a piece of land? I can do no better than this
passage from Elliot Merrick’s fine book Green Mountain Farm (1999,
Countryman Press). In his book, Merrick chronicles the years during
which he and his wife, Kay, purchased and lived on a 50-acre farm in
Craftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles up the road from our place. In this
passage, Elliot and Kay are discussing what they want from their
someday farm.
We used to laugh about the things we wanted, and Kay had
it all doped out. “What we really need,” she said, “is a place
high up on a mountaintop, deep in a fertile valley, right
beside a sandy beach on the seacoast, with rich loam soil
beginning right behind the beach—something on the order
of Iowa. We should be miles away from everybody,
completely isolated, although marvelous friends are
dropping in and out all of the time and the New York Public
Library is right next door. We have scads of skiing,
interspersed with long periods of hot sun bathing, and
although the place doesn’t cost anything, it’s worth about a
million dollars.”
“Just a simple little house,” I added, “with a fine big
cellar, slate roof, two bathrooms and a shop. Also a good
barn, fences just right, and enough timber in the woods to