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Couple making effort at going natural |
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Monday, 10 November 2008 |
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Photo by Heidi Zemach Jeanette Stump holds her newest little goat, Bucaroo, at Little Mill Creek Goats Farm on Montmorenci Road, north of Ridgway. Ridgway couple making an attempt at producing all their own food.
By Heidi Zemach
Special to The Ridgway Record
The moment you enter the driveway and pass the bearded goats and busy chickens of Little Mill Creek farm, seven miles north of Ridgway, you realize that you are at a place where someone is fulfilling their dreams.
The small storefront of Jeanette and Cliff Stump’s home, with its aroma of freshly made soap and home-baked bread, only deepens that sentiment.
The Stumps, who married only eight years ago and began building and running a small farm, say their mission now is to live as simply as possible in order to allow others to simply live. They do so by eating natural, wholesome foods — and providing the products they use for others, including home-baked breads, canned goods and goat cheese, goat fudge, and scented goat-milk soap.
The gobblers are enjoying their last weeks before being put on Thanksgiving tables by customers hungry for free-range-turkey. In a wooden bin nearby, red wiggly worms are busily working their way through garbage and outdoor leavings, creating compost for next summer’s garden. The chickens roosting in boxes are momentarily irked at Jeanette, who wants to collect their eggs for her basket. And in the goat barn, a tiny Billy goat named Buckaroo, whose mother had birthed too many goats to care for, begins shrilly wailing for his bottle. The bottle having been violently sucked dry in about 40 seconds, and the tour complete, Jeanette returns inside to talk at a dining room table, where a variety of newly-made soap, freshly removed from their molds, are drying.
Jeanette, formerly a nutrition adviser with Penn State Cooperative Extension, began baking and selling her breads at the local farmer’s market to keep occupied once her children left home. In the fall she found a new niche selling breads at Bell’s Meat Market in Kane. Especially popular among the many Swedish customers was the Swedish rye bread Jeanette taught herself to bake.
Cliff, who is retired from the Johnsonburg paper mill as a pipe-fitter, enjoys woodworking, in particular with antique hand tools. He remodeled the old farmhouse, put in a root cellar for canned goods, and then built Jeanette a chicken barn, goat barn and milking stanchions. In addition to helping milk the goats, he cans goods, tends the garden, taps Maple trees and makes maple syrup and apple butter in the traditional way.
Both share a common life-long preference for chemical-free natural foods that predates the natural foods movement sweeping the nation. Thanks to his mother, Cliff grew up enjoying fresh breads and locally-grown food. In her old age, he helped her grow her garden and can. Cliff used to purchase local beef and pork from workers at the paper mill who also raised farm animals.
For Jeanette, bread baking, or watching Cliff transforming regular apples into apple-butter, symbolizes home, family and a lifestyle she lost early on, but had yearned for. Healthy living has become her therapy. When she was only three years old, Jeanette was dropped off at the Mooseheart Orphanage in Illinois, and separated from her six older siblings, after their father died. Jeanette lived in the facility along with other little children her age, while her brothers and sisters were placed in other units. She missed her siblings, her father and grandmother, and their small farm in rural Sharon.
When Jeanette was eight, the orphanage adopted the centralized kitchen method, serving mostly canned, government-issue food, steamed in huge, vacuum-sealed aluminum vats, and delivered in linked stainless-steel containers. Jeanette hated the food, and found it to be tasteless, odorless, and often indistinguishable. At times, breakfast came with cereal-company surveys for the children to fill out in exchange for free cereal that the companies donated.
When she was old enough, Jeanette was she able to visit two of her older brothers, who were working in the orphanages’ dairy farm. That really felt like home, Jeanette said. In her upper teens, Jeanette learned how to bake breads and can produce with a friend. And later, as a mother, she would continue baking, canning, and cooking healthy food while raising her own four children. She insisted that they eat together at the table every night, like real families did.
The Stumps enjoy sharing their farm with small groups and visitors who are interested — especially children. Jeanette also holds private classes in soap–making. She finds the process of mixing a useless caustic ingredient like sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye, with fat and watching it saponify (or gel) to produce soap amazing.
Goat milk’s various beneficial health factors also provide an endless source of wonder to this self-taught nutritionist and life-long learner. Although she has always had a thing for goats — ever since reading the book "Heidi" — Jeanette also believes that goat milk is more nutritious and superior in digestibility than cow’s milk. The proof came when her ailing two-month-old granddaughter Ariana began experiencing severe health problems, cried constantly, and could not be consoled, Jeanette said. After the baby’s parents had tried several different types of formula without success, and were at their wits end, Jeanette’s daughter Cherey finally agreed to give her baby a quart of goat’s milk. That night, Ariana stopped crying and fussing, and began sleeping three to four hours at a stretch. Ariana, now 1 1/2, drinks nothing but goat’s milk, and is doing fine, Jeanette said. For her, the story illustrates that Little Mill Creek was truly their destiny.
“We had no idea that someday we would have goats, or that they would one day be keeping this little baby alive!,” Jeanette said. “It’s like it was meant to be.” |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 30 July 2009 )
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