Cold Antler Farm: A Memoir of Growing Food and Celebrating Life on a Scrappy Six-Acre Homestead

Jenna Woginrich

Jun 2014 · Shambhala Publications

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Jenna Woginrich is well loved for her essays on all that accompanies the life of a true homesteader: the mud and mess, the beautiful and tragic, the grime and passion. In Cold Antler Farm, she draws our attention to the timekeeper of such a lifestyle: the ancient agricultural year, filled with celebrations and seasonal touchstones that mark turning points in the cycles of life.

Amidst these new-old holidays, we learn the stories of her beloved animals and crops. May apple blossoms become sweet fruit for rambunctious sheep in June. Come September, the apple harvest draws together neighbors for cider making under the waning summer sun. These living beings fuel one another—and the community—day to day, season by season.

If we examine what living seasonally truly means, the agrarian calendar becomes a source of wisdom. How do we set down roots and break new ground in spring? How can we best nourish body and soul in the heat of deep summer? And what can we learn by simply paying more attention to the weather? Cold Antler Farm encourages us to eat and live well with respect for the natural rhythms of the year. In turn we learn what it means to be truly connected.

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JENNA WOGINRICH is a thirty-something homesteader and the author of Barnheart, Chick Days, Made from Scratch, and Days of Grace. A Pennsylvania native, she has made her home in the mountains of Tennessee, in northern Idaho, in rural Vermont, and most recently in upstate New York, where she lives with a flock of Scottish Blackface sheep, a border collie-in-training, chickens and geese, a hive of bees, and several amiable rabbits.