Mountain Top Goat Gardens

Mountain Top Goat Gardens
Life on a Mountain with Goats,
Garden, Music, Art, & Love.
Life on a Mountain with Goats,
Garden, Music, Art, & Love.
Goats, Gardens, Art, Music & Love.
A Partner in Time Production.
#1 Spring, 2015

GOATS!
Explore the exploits of a couple of
creative refugees from urban living in a
forest growing food, making cheese, &
discovering our abilities; living a life of
multi media art & music, playing guitar
& violin music, as the musical duo
FRISKY BRISKET. Writing, making,
art, & food. living with nature, and the
creatures that sustain us. Goats, our
mascot, the great anarchists of
domestic animals. Birds; Chickens for
eggs, & Pigeons for grace, Honeybees
for the flowers & fruit, & for the buzz. A
Dog for comfort, protection, &
exuberance, & Cats, because they are
cats.
and, a cast of thousands, both
unseen, and relished; the wild birds
we encourage, the Goldfish that
patrol the Pond, the Dragonflies that
burst forth in multitude once or twice
a year, if you are present to
experience it, & the high flying
Geese that announce their north &
south passage seasonally.
Welcome to our world.
As an Artist, this media offers
unprecedented opportunities, but,
with the daily chore load of our
complex life style, this will
necessarily become a sporadic
project. As I discover new abilitiesand
the limits of my patience when it
come to screen watching, finger
tapping sessions I hope in the future
to offer more inspiration to others.
Joshua & Tanya are:
Partners in Time.
www.FriskyBrisket.info
© 2015 Joshua Golden/Partners in Time

Life as Art.
Located at 2,100’ and 8 miles inland,
on a Southwest facing mountain top,
we are a non-commercial, off-grid
farmstead, in Northern Mendocino
County, California. Making Art,
Music, & Food together for over 30
years, & Homesteading since 1989.
With a small dairy goat herd,
chickens for eggs, fruit trees and
vines, and a diversified garden that
provides year round food
production, we a focus on organic,
open pollinated crops, intuitive
permaculture, and natural processes.
Our work includes; animal
husbandry, cheese making, soil
building, seed saving, garden & forest
management, building projects,
music & art.

Grounded by
nature.
not a very good place for farming. The
only reason anyone would live on the
top of this small mountain is economic.
Scarred by heavy equipment harvesting
old growth Douglas Fir has left scrubby
and dense second growth, and all the
hardwoods that flourished in the newly
opened canopy. The soil has been
scrapped to rock for roads and
landings, and the topsoil was never very
deep. The winds are intense. We get
gail force storms out of the south in the
winter, and thermal gusts from the
north in the spring and summer.
Though abundant water appears in
springs all over the hill, the water we
control is below the most level and
open sites. We arrived here with
dreams of self sufficiency, and learned
that is never a feasible concept.
And yet;
There is no way to accurately describe
being in one place over time, engaged
with and observing the cycles of nature.
The annual transit of the sun, ever
changing shadows. The coming of
seasons and the tasks they require,
Daily rituals that contribute to
sustenance are informed by conditions
on the ground, the realities of reality.
Nature is our guide.
This 20 acre parcel was affordable, but
conditions are less than ideal. This is
Scratching the soil for twenty six years,
adding to it tons of composted biomass,
and little else, pumping water with a self
regulating solar pump, raising goats &
chickens, playing with bees & pigeons,
grooming the forest, & plantings, and
reaping harvests- both work-a-day &
experimental, has made this a glorious
place. We rely quite heavily on food
produced on site, purchasing mostly
exotic fruits like Avocados, Bananas,
Oranges, & Melons earlier than we can
produce. Eating in season, utilizing what
is available, and supplementing this with
basic staples, we are not ”self sufficient”,
but tenaciously self reliant. ☆

Growing up in the suburban San
Francisco Bay Area, we both had, early
experiences in the surrounding hills and
coastal areas. The foothill habitats of
the coastal ranges, offered both the
intimate experience of untrammeled
nature, and, a vista of the of the
impending urban sprawl that threatened
it. Early memories of the scents and
sensations of these forests and meadows
imprinted a love of our home region in
both of us. We met each other while
attending a unique high school- in the
waning days of California’s educational
excellence, and progressive
experimentation. Our alternative school
‘with-in-a-school’ offered all the
resources of a well funded district,
combined with the freedom and
flexibility to design our own education,
to meet our individual needs. We both
credit any success we claim in life, to
t h i s p h e n o m e n a , a s a u t h o r i t y
questioning, independent thinkers, we
surly would have become public school
casualties had we been forced to
continue our education in the usual
way. I credit my early interest in growing
food with a small seminar style field
trip, Where we met John Jeavons and
toured the original research garden of a
non-profit organization, with a mission
to feed the world efficiently- Common
Ground, on a hill above Palo Alto.
Coming of age, we could not hope to
find affordable housing in our home
town, and so began a slightly miserable
life style of wage earning, edge dwelling
creativity in the cheap seats of the
Peninsula. I had briefly attended Art
school in San Francisco, while Tanya
trained as a chef. This had turned into
working at restaurants, print shops and
cafes, leaving us wondering, how we
could possibly ever live our dreams.
Eventually desperation lead us to
escape. Packing away and selling off our
belongings we headed for Mexico, and
new horizons, new experiences,
inexpensive opportunities, and,
Montezuma’s revenge. Traveling the
length of Mexico by train was a trip to
remember- winding slowly from the
volcanic heights of Mexico City to
Oaxaca in a vintage American Pullman
sleeper, was romantic but the whole
experience, the heat, the language
barrier, stress & illness found us beating
a retreat after only a month. ☆

The Garden:
A vibrant living thing which feeds us.
Recognizing that the garden is a
complex, dynamic environment, and
not a mechanized factory for food
production, is a key to a human scaled
subsistence farming. Often it appears
that backyard gardeners in this country
seek to emulate commercial production
techniques, creating miniature versions
of big agriculture, and repeating many
of it’s mistakes. The standards of
production that we have come to expect
are predicated on the practices of an
industrialized agriculture that has only
been in effect for around 100 years. Yet
through out the long span of post
agricultural humanity, people in
cooperation with plants, seasons, and
available resources have fed themselves
and created fuel and fiber.
My operating principle has always
been; it can’t be that hard to survive, but
the absolutely necessary addendum to
this is: if we do the right thing. That may
be the hardest thing. Who knows what
the right thing is anymore? Generations
of information and wisdom have been
lost or set aside as agriculture has
progressed and diminished. Left to
‘experts’, the practice of growing has
been established and codified as an
extractive process. Unfortunately, this is
exactly the opposite way nature
operates. The additive process of
natural production is based on growth,
which invariably brings decay. As the
cycle repeats endlessly, countless
generations of living organisms
participate in transforming,
recombining, and, adding to the raw
materials that sustain everyone and
everything on the planet.
With these notions as my foundation, I
seek to grow food as intuitively as my
modern mind can manage. I defer to no
expert opinion, but observe conditions,
and approach the problems of pests and
nutrients conservatively, mimicking
nature with tolerance and adaptation.
The results speak for themselves. As we
daily, year round, eat fresh food from
our garden. Our garden is large and
diverse to guarantee this.
Nearly anyone can grow something to
eat, but relying on the garden for a
constant supply of nutrition necessarily
becomes a way of life. There is no
separation in nature, a true integration

of living and lively hood is a
prerequisite for a natural process of
living. Acquiring sustenance is an
ongoing and necessary challenge that
requires a commitment to the process.
The aphorism- “The best fertilizer is
the farmers shadow,” exemplifies this
principle. The work is not all difficult,
but success depends seasonally, on daily
participation, and observation. The
cycles of the garden are always
churning, there is no beginning or end
to the garden, just the process. This can
make starting a garden from scratch a
challenge, but once the appreciation of
cycles is established, a holistic approach
develops priorities organically, and the
wheel of the year turns evenly. My year
is defined by tasks I take for granted,
the seasons of new seeds, the seasons of
new soil, the seasons of observant
waiting and grooming, the seasons of
abundant joyous growth and gathering,
and the seasons of rest and recharge.
Timing is one of the most critical
components, a plant in it’s proper time,
given a decent chance, can’t help but
grow. The decent chance consists
simply of adequate soil tilth, nutritive
material, space, sun, and water. Tilth,
the physical condition of the plant
supporting soil assures adequate
permeability to the essential elements of
air and water, and encourages expansive
root development so that the plant may
find the resources it needs to grow and
completing it’s lifecycle, fruit. Nutrition
consists of organic material, anything
that has lived, and the biota that
supports the break down to it’s
molecular components, along with the
available minerals in the soil, these are
the building blocks of new life. The
space a plant occupies helps determine
it’s size, and productivity crowding
many plants together diminishes the
available sunlight, nutrient base, and
capacity of the plants. Solar exposure, is
crucial, the sugars of life are created by
the photosynthetic capacity of plants
leaves, the fuel for this process is
starlight from our nearest and dearest,
the sun. Water keeps it all going, the
presence or absence of water
determines life spans and the adequacy
of the plants purpose. some plants can
survive Drought, but all plants need
need water to grow, and flourish.

Milk & Manure is the answer to the
question; Why goats. Milk as a food
source has enabled humans to survive
and flourish forever. There is some
controversy over the use of milk as an
adult food, as milk is indeed produced
as nutrition for baby mammals. But
once the argument devolves to basics
like; grains, fruits, & vegetables grow
only too produce seeds, or meats can
only be used for the motive force of
animals, we see how narrow & flexible
human thinking can be. There are no
definite rules when it comes to food
sources, only what works, what is
tolerated, and what is expected.
Humans have evolved to be omnivores,
opportunistic feeder’s and milk
producing animals were cultivated for
the nutritious milk they produce as
soon as it was possible.
We are not big liquid milk drinkers, but
we do add raw milk to our our morning
bitter bean extract- coffee, and use milk
for cooking & baking. For a long time
we made yoghurt, but since we acquired
some Kefir grains, this much simpler
cultured product has taken its place.
Our bread & butter is a soft Chévre, a
creamy style of cheese that is easy to
produce and delicious to consume.
Pressed, aged hard cheese is a little
more challenging, but many amazing
cheeses have been made over the goat
years.
Manure is a major product of animal
husbandry. Considered waste by some
management systems manure is the key
ingredient to healthy & productive soils.
Goats in particular convert course
material into immediately useful
fertilizer. And when composted with
their bedding is an ideal worm food,
producing twice digested worm castings.
Our garden production depends almost
exclusively on this continuously
renewing resource, and rewards us with
abundant nutrition.
© 2015 Partners in time/Joshua Golden