Lehman's Country Life

I arrived at my Texas farm in September, in time to see in a fall season’s plantings in the Community Supported Agriculture garden.  This was novel enough for me, coming from much further north where planting tends to end in the summer or maybe early fall, but certainly not in November.  But here, we still haven’t had our first frost and it doesn’t seem to be coming up any time soon.  Furthermore, here we very rarely have hard frosts—the high teens are the coldest people near Waco ever expect to see.  In a winter like this, brassicas, lettuces, and root crops can make it all the way through with little to no protection.

Our Community Supported Agriculture program runs from April through July and then from October through December—that’s right, a break in the summer because of the heat—but I have been told that the only reason we take a break in the winter is for our own rest.  If it were up to the vegetables and the weather we could go all year round, planting crops for the weather that suits them of course, but never running dry on harvest.

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The farm I live on, World Hunger Relief, Inc. in Waco, Texas, uses composting toilets rather than flushing toilets.  I had heard about them before I came and thought it was just a quirky thing that they did, having a toilet that didn’t require plumbing, but I quickly realized upon my arrival that every toilet in common use on the property uses sawdust instead of water.

I remember my first tour of the place—I arrived at night and was given a quick tour of the dorm by Melody.  We walked into the bathroom, with two sinks and a small shower and a teal-colored door in the back.  Melody worked up a bit of theatrics for us:  “And this,” she said as she opened the door, revealing a teal staircase with teal walls leading up to a bench with a toilet lid on it, “is the throne.”
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I grew up in the city, so coming to live and work on the World Hunger Relief farm in Waco, Texas is one great big learning experience for me.  Since my arrival a few months ago, I have learned so much, from where eggs are kept in the pantry, to where we keep the sawdust for our composting toilets, to how a community of 25 organizes itself for a day’s farm work, to how to milk a goat. Though the composting toilet certainly merits elaboration, the last is perhaps the most colorful story for a girl who grew up far removed from her food.

The WHR farm is a Grade-A raw goat milk producer. The pasteurization and homogenization process that milk from a supermarket goes through means that it loses a lot of valuable enzymes and proteins as well as a lot of its flavor.  Raw milk, on the other hand, is incredibly fresh–I was astounded that it took only about an hour from milking to lining up the bottles in the fridge, ready for sale.
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