Slowdown Farmstead

Further notes to topics discussed:

Please note that any questions submitted after the deadline weren’t included in these Q&As. I print the questions out on the deadline and go from there so I wouldn’t even see them. I will release further answers this Wednesday. I’m going to try to get through as many as I can.

Here’s a few links I promised to include in this, part two of my answers to your

Before I jumped right into answering questions in this health focused Q&As, I wanted to set things up a bit. I thought it was important, and hopefully useful, to hear how I’ve learned to watch for patterns and marketing hype in our midst. The hot topic du jour is sure to be replaced by another in a couple of weeks. When we stop focusing on the details and start looking for patterns, our manipulation is evident and our choices can be sovereign.

A few links to go along with this episode:

Every couple has their own way of loving each other. Over time a language, unique to the bond that is ‘them’, forms. We learn to read each other’s mannerisms. We can find frustration in a tone and hurt in the shrinking of touch. As a woman, raised in the time of “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, I grew up with many destructive narratives around women and relationships that can be drilled down into two main themes:

* My worth was determined by my ability to keep up with men. Somehow, and this

A few months ago I was at a gathering out here in the wild country. A woman came up to me out of the blue and said, “Climate change is real,  you know”. I was a little taken aback. There had been no conversation around the topic. She didn’t know what I thought nor was she asking. There was no invitation to conversation. Just a statement, like a dropped …

I first heard of Frank Meyers in 2012. We were living on our old farm at the time. It had taken years of planning, saving, preparing, and searching before we finally bought that farm. I felt good. I felt secure. We finally had land. We were finally in a position where we were fully responsible for ourselves. Come hell or high water, we knew we had what it took to be independent and sovereign stewards of the land. Then Frank appeared on the scene. Frank Meyers, an elderly man that farmed the entirety of his life on the land his great grandfather was bequeathed by King George III. Frank, who along with a bunch of other landowners were given ultimatums by the federal government: sell us your land or we’ll take it anyway.

“Eminent domain” - that’s what it’s called in Canada when the government is going to expropriate your land. Expropriate just means they’re taking it and that’s that. Sell or we’ll take it anyway. The government had decided it was going to be using Frank’s land, and the land all around him, to build a training facility for the military. Many of Frank’s neighbours, under pressure to vacate, sold their rural properties and farms. Frank, and a handful of others, stood fast. Their land wasn’t for sale and the government wasn’t going to take it without a fight. 

“There is a good chance it could end up like the Pickering airport where land was expropriated then never used and when it was finally declared surplus it was too expensive for the original owners to buy it back,” John Meyers told Ontario Farmer.

As late as last year his supporters were urging the government to return the expropriated land to Frank and Marjorie Meyers.

In granting the expropriation, then public works and supply services minister Rona Ambrose, declared, “I am of the opinion that the properties proposed for expropriation are absolutely essential for the safety or security of Canada and, for that reason and in absence of valid justifications to do otherwise, I have confirmed my intention to expropriate.” - Ontario Farmer

The first time I saw a picture of Frank I wept. Behind his steely resolve, I sensed his stunned desperation. Here was a man that did it all right. He worked hard every day of his life. He adapted to the changing times of farming. He followed the rules and paid his taxes. He tended his animals and the land. And just like that, with the the sweep of a pen, it was gone.

Meetings were held to find alternatives. Media coverage grew. People were outraged. Some blamed Frank for being a liberal and trying to make the conservative government, then in power, look bad. I think about that today and how I’ve heard the same only with switching out the two parties. Imagine an old farmer fighting for his land today being described as a “lefty”? Goes to prove that fighting over political parties is merely a distraction and a tool to divide.

Many people rallied behind Frank and his family. The news coverage illicited sympathy by some, outrage from others. Sentiments were divided. Some people felt the injection of a new military training facility would grow the economy and any other point of view was an affront to progress. Where food comes from, what good farmland even meant, was viewed as trite and insignificant.

From a hearing regarding the expropriation of Frank’s land: 

“When it was Frank’s turn to speak, he was typically brief. “They don’t make any more farmland,” he said, dressed in blue work pants and brown boots, his wife Marjorie at his side. “The federal government has hundreds of acres within 24 kms that is no good for farmland. I don’t see why they cannot use that land.” Behind him, more than a dozen locals listened to him speak. Some shook their head in agreement.

Doug Knutson, a Belleville filmmaker who has spent the past 20 years working on a documentary about Capt. Meyers, also stepped up to the microphone. “I don’t know how much bearing, if any, that historical significance will play in this decision,” he said. “However, I do feel that this land, as a working and viable farm being tended by the same family for over 225 years, can be seen as a living link to a very important figure in our history. It has the same significance as any monument or historical site. We are a young country yet we don’t seem to treasure our historical legacy, and I worry about that.”

It makes me wonder if what followed was hostile punishment from bureaucrats frustrated with Frank’s tenacity. By 2014, the government was done with being polite. They sent in bulldozers and destroyed Frank’s barns. Why they needed to imminently come down is a mystery. There were no building plans at the time. In fact, nothing at all was happening.

“It is very sad to see the wanton destruction of the buildings. Thousands and thousands of materials destroyed with NO THOUGHT to salvaging anything - virtually new grain silos crumpled and piled on top of a heap of the tin sheets that used to clad the barns and cover the roofs, hundreds of hand hewn barn beams splintered in a pile, hundreds of board feet of barn board....all gone to land fills and scrap yards. These people have way too much $. I think it would have been easier to watch them salvage stuff than watching them just knock things down, leaving a pile of garbage for Frank to see every day.”  Ken Dearborn”

And there it all sat, “…a pile of garbage for Frank to see every day.” Rubble and stagnation. His family farm gone.

Two years after the bulldozers had come and gone, the government had a change of heart. The cost to build the facility was too much after all. There would be no anti-terrorism training facility in Trenton. The family begged to have the land returned but they were refused. 

“…the site will be offered up within DND and then to other federal departments. After that it could be offered to provincial and municipal governments. “If there is no interest at these levels, the property will be sold on the open market through an open and fair process,” a DND spokeswoman has said.. 

Frank Meyers died on September 15th, 2019 in his 91st year of life. He never cashed the cheque the government sent him.

When the government cheques arrived in February—totaling $3.3 million, according to one published report—Meyers refused to cash them. He still does. “I don’t want the money, I want the land,” he says. “This has got nothing to do with the price. I’ve told them that from the beginning.”

Meyers has no idea when the heavy equipment will arrive, or what he’ll do when it does. “What can I do?” he asks. “What would you do? “Why not just take me out, tie my hands, and shoot me instead of harassing me for eight years? What is the difference?”

The government recently announced they would be using Frank’s land as an ammunition depot. Prime farmland as an ammo depot. They have filled it with hundreds of thousands of pounds of rocks to build up berms. Warehouses come next. Wonderfully, the depot will be LEEDS certified because a government, after all, must be seen to be sensitive to the needs of the climate even when all life has been paved over.

Frank’s story pulled back the curtain for me. My understanding of how things worked crumbled. My ideas that one can earn or buy security were wiped away. I simply couldn’t believe the cruelty and the conviction of politicians I thought were there to serve the people. I was shocked by some of the commenters who called Frank “greedy” for only caring about his farm and not “jobs”. I was heartbroken to realize that even though we had worked so hard to get to where we were, to have our own farm, that, as Frank showed us all, is no assurance.

All of this is the truth behind the mortgages and the titles. The globalists tell us “we will own nothing and we’ll be happy”. We own nothing already. Anything can be taken at any time. Happen to live where they want to put a new highway or maybe where they need a new solar farm or training centre to go? Sorry, bud, you gotta’ go.

Soon enough, with the monetizing of all of the carbon (life) on earth, they will have further claims on the wild and the free. They need your land to properly protect it. Humans are a festering wound on the planet and must be removed from the equation. Labs will grow pseudo-foods that keep us pseudo-alive long enough to pump us with pseudo-medicines. Our contributions measured in dollars spent and earned.

We can own something, some little piece of the pie, but let’s not delude ourselves with what that means. There may be a good feeling in that for now, but if we’re truly honest we must admit and accept that there is no such thing as security in this world. There is no fortress you can build or possibilities you can account for that will deliver you to the protective arms of safety forever and ever amen. If you have what they want, they can take it. 

And here’s where we divide in our response to this truth. Some people may say, “Well, hell, Tara, what’s the point in even trying? I might as well not even bother.” I think that’s an altogether wrong approach. We try and we work and we muster what we got to muster because that is the whole point of being alive! There is no measure in the things we accumulate. There is only the ‘measure of a man’.

The first part in finding solace around that truth is in admitting the truth. Everything we love can be gone in an instant. We can lose it all. Our greatest loves will die. This existence is not meant for only the sweet and mild. There are bulldozers and bureaucrats around every bend.

But that doesn’t mean we live in fear. It means we live. It means we learn to understand our time here as one of growth and experience. In forgetting ourselves as spirit, we are defenceless. When this world and this stuff is all we got, of course we’re afraid. And when people are afraid, they distract themselves with a multitude of offerings so they just don’t have to think about it, or they become totally immobilized. They stop living in fear of really living.

So, there I was, all those years ago, understanding that our farm and our chosen lifestyles, no matter our efforts, were not the salvation I was gunning for. I understood then that our efforts mattered but there was no guarantee. I could work and learn and toil and sweat, but the gift that Frank showed me was that it was in these actions that I was rewarded, not in some faraway promise of security. I keep the raw truth in my heart and use it to remind me: everything is fleeting, nothing is certain, be here, be love, now.

Frank taught me that I can put the efforts of my life into that which I love most of all but security and peace are only momentary gifts. I preserve food for a future of unknown food security. We have worked to develop skills and collect tools. We have set ourselves up for EMPs and electrical blackouts. We can outfox the foxes and defend ourselves against wayward trolls. But we know that this world is not the end and our missions may never be fully revealed. And it doesn’t matter. I would do it all over again. If in the end, they take it all, I still live without regret.

At a time when I was certain salvation was just over the crest of the next summit, Frank stood with watery eyes telling me “they can take it in an instant, girl”. But there are things they cannot take and those are the things that I am feeding and nourishing with each mound of earth I shovel and each birdsong I witness. From here I go there. There is no end. There is no measure. The parts that matter are untouchable. Frank didn’t get his farm back and here I am telling you how much he, a stranger, had an impact on my life. And now here you are, knowing an old man named “Frank” who doesn’t live here anymore, at least not like we do, but lives on all the same.

Rest in peace, Frank. You taught so many of us more than you knew then, but I suspect you may just know now.

“May you find healing.”

“Do you feel that you have healed?”

“Is there healing in that for you?”

“You seem like you are healing.”

I’m hearing these words, all spoken to me over the last few years, as I reach for the apples above my head. Each tree here, bowed and heavy with her apples. Trees that were strategically planted, over a hundred years ago, by humans long gone. Other trees planted by us, young and flexible, with a flush of virgin fruit. They have grown for years with perhaps a blossom here and there, but never fruit. I wonder if they are marvelling at their own, newly awoken superpower. From them, beautiful, rosy orbs to tempt the seed carriers. 

I grew up not knowing that there were ‘good apple years’ and ‘no apple years’. There was always a red delicious apple in my paper lunch bag. So ubiquitous, it was no more special than the brown paper it came in. I hated red delicious apples. They tasted like chalky potatoes to me. I traded mine or threw it away without a thought. Some anonymous tree, in some anonymous land, picked by some anonymous person who put that apple on a conveyer belt that waxed and polished it so it was as perfect as the plastic fruit on my friend’s dining room table. It probably tasted the same, too. 

These apples, the ones all about me, are not those apples. These apples I have come to know. These trees, I have come to understand. In front of our house, the most magnificent of all. An apple tree so full and robust and heavy with apples that she encircles more than half of our screened in porch. She is the one that scratches along the metal gables of our bedroom on windy nights. She is the one that grows apples, striped light green and pale pinky-red, that grow in clusters like grapes. Tens of thousands of apples and she holds them all. Her trunk is as mighty as an oak. Her limbs stretch far and hold strong. She is our great privacy screen when we sit in our porch early in the morning and I read stories to my husband. She is our co-celebrator when we retire to our little porch with something cold at the end of a sweaty summer day. In her limbs the dramas of battling squirrels and newly minted baby birds taking their first flight. I wonder if she dreams of the Brown Thrashers that pick worms from her skin while she hibernates through our long, cold winters.

There are other apple trees, too. The tree behind our house offers the old fashioned Macintosh. The one ‘before’. Before tomfoolery and storage and transportation and the changing desire for sweet over taste messed around with these trees. These Macs, my favourite of all apples, are perfection. A crunch so hard it snaps. A taste so piquant and sharp it lets loose a million little firecrackers on the tongue. And juice so abundant you have to swallow twice on your first chew. These apples grab you and pull you into the now. There is no way to eat them mindlessly. They will stop you in your tracks. They will make you look at them while you eat. Vacant filling of the maw is impossible when tastebud meets Creation.

There are trees that offer apples you will see on no store shelves. Small green apples with pink polka dots. Ruddy green apples with rust coloured stripes that, I am certain, are the mothers of “Granny Smith” only infinitely more delicious. There are oblong apples and medium sized apples and perfect, dark ruby crabapples. Some are for cider making. Some for fresh eating or storage. Others are perfect for apple butter and other preserves. 

For each apple a tree that grew it. For each tree, a different story - a different time in its life. Our young trees are simple. Their bark smooth. Their limbs can bend in great arches under the weight of their fruit. Some, overzealous in their offerings do break. Some splinter. Too ambitious in their growth. They’re full throttle and then they burn themselves out. There is something uncomplicated about a tree like that. I pick her apples with gratitude, but her limbs are sparse. She is lean and open wide. She’s still taking it all in. 

There are three old apple trees in amongst the younger ones in the orchard. They have, over the decades, had big limbs cut back or broken off. The chickens dust bathe under the shade of one on hot summer days. We had a cow trough under that tree once, years ago. My husband and our daughter, Mila, used to play chess in that cold, deep well water on sweltering summer days. They would take a kombucha with them. I remember standing by the fence post watching them there, with the tree framing them as they laughed at each other. I remember thinking there was no moment more perfect between a father and his daughter than that one. I never had that with my father and I was overwhelmed by the love between the two of them. I took a picture. I’m so glad I took that picture.

I spent Sunday morning inside the world of our most luscious apple tree - the one I already mentioned, Ms. Bountiful and Bodacious that surrounds an entire corner of our home. I had to separate her limbs to walk into her. I would take one step in and stop to pluck her apples and drop them in my bushel basket. Then, once I had reached every last apple within my grasp, I would take another step in. In less than three steps, I would have my full bushel and start another. There were leaves winding through my hair, encircling my body. Apples dropped on my head as one pluck from me loosened five more from her branches that dropped to the ground. One of our more playful barn cats, Lucy, came to pounce on the dropped fruit. The tree laughed and shook. I could feel her vibration through every leaf that kissed me. 

“Life!” She is such a beautiful apple tree. So unencumbered by scarcity. When the tent caterpillars hit a couple of years ago, she was stripped bare of all of her plump little buds. She took what she had, as did all of her apple siblings, and tried again that very same year. It was that or it was entering into winter depleted. A hard winter would be enough to kill her. Her second round of leaflets were puny and shrivelled but they caught enough sunbeams to let her get by. There were no apples that next year or the next. She needed everything she had just to survive.

She is an old tree but she is full. She is exuberant. Life has given her a choice spot to live. Her roots are nourished by nutrients another apple tree, further down the corner of the yard, cannot reach. That tree had to grow tall and thin to live at all within the dense trees around her. I need a ladder just to pluck the few apples she is able to muster. But it’s the tree in our backyard, the one that the big, picture window in our living room frames that calls to my heart now.

She’s a quiet, unassuming tree, maybe even a bit ugly now. A craggy apple tree. Over the decades, people have cut off limbs that died when she was no longer able to supply her blood to their tips. We, too, have taken out our chain saw and cut back lifeless limbs that threatened to splinter what’s left of her. It’s only served to exaggerate her odd shape. One long limb branching from a trunk full of scars. There was life there, behind those scars, once. Now just a dark mark. She throws up vertical branches every year, an attempt to increase her leaves to absorb the life of the sun, but it’s not enough. There are too few leaves. There are too few branches and limbs. Life is dwindling for her. I look at her in the winter from the warmth of my sofa in front of a chugging wood stove and wonder what she is doing below that snow encrusted, skeletal form.

She is everything Ms. Bountiful and Bodacious is not. A ladder under her two main branches and a little shake and her tiny apples all succumb to the earth. Her apples are small, tiny even. But they are layered and sweet and tart and zesty and they remind you that an apple is not an apple and that nature is a marvel. In her apples, the genius and wild imagination of Creation. There is more to her than it seems.

In this time, when life wanes, who would blame this ancient tree if she simply decided to stop offering apples? If she simply went off into retirement, having given over a hundred years of apples to thousands of creatures, wouldn’t we all agree in the fairness of it all? But she continues to blossom year after year. She continues to grow her wondrous little apples. The generations of deer that come here every fall, the shy mothers showing their fawns all of the choice apple trees on the land just as their mothers showed them, always go to her first. Maybe she knows that. Maybe she does it for them.

She will die completely soon. She will die with the last of her apples dangling from her limbs. The last of her energy dedicated to life beyond her own. She will give it all away, every last drop of her. She teaches me and I am a witness to her fidelity. There is joy and abundance in the perfection of her apple tree counterparts, but she is wisdom and selfless devotion. She is perpetual. She, like all of the other trees, like all of life that once lived and served, will one day be absorbed fully back into the fold. The trunk that remains will crumble and feed the universes that live amongst her roots.

The new mulberry trees brought the Cedar Waxwings here for the very first time last year. Six of them came and landed in her branches to wait for those mulberries to hit the peak of perfection. A new type of bird with new song and a different grasp on her skin. She would have noticed that. Life that depends on her, even when she can no longer offer the plump and the shiny. The deer still come. The goldfinches still land. The human still picks her fruit. And she still endures. With everything she has, until the last drop of life courses through her and she is nothing more than a skeleton made of wood.

They ask me, now, if I “have found healing”. They ask me if what I do “brings healing”. People want there to be closure. People want us to be okay. The truth is there is no end. There is no finish line. Healing isn’t found at all. All of life is the opening and closing of wounds and love and peace and pain. It doesn’t end. Not here, anyway. I don’t look for healing. I don’t want courses or gurus or books to fix me. I want old apple trees anointed by the touch of God. Trees that wrap themselves around me and laugh at their abundance and trees that gasp the last of their life-force into a lovely little apple, round and perfect, so that I may bring into my body that which is theirs. Resurrection. Divinity. An allegiance to the sacred. Now and forever. Amen.

I had quite a few ‘anonymous’ submissions to my latest Q&As. They all had the same general theme. Instead of addressing on in particular, I sat Troy down with me to discuss our thoughts around what to do when our spouse doesn’t uphold the same values around health and nutrition. I don’t think …

In this final ask me anything episode we talk retirement funds, God, sports teams, halloween, resources for young mamas (please share yours in the comments below), preserving without sugar, freezer paper, and heavens know what else. It’s all a blur at this point. Enjoy!

In this batch of questions we discuss everything from record keeping to writing, substack growth (or not), hardwood floors, grief, complaining children, schooling, braising meat, and everything in between.