Writing a blog is neither as easy nor as interesting as I’d thought it would be. But that’s no excuse for slacking off the way I have.

A much better “excuse” would be the eye surgery. With the cataract, I had trouble seeing. Without it, I’m still having trouble, because my glasses don’t work. But I’m not getting new glasses until after the other eye is done. Excuses, excuses.

Reasons are something else. One of the main ones is that I seriously doubted whether anyone was reading my posts. (Or my book either, for that matter. To a writer’s mind, the two are related.) Our mantra is “Love me or hate me, but please spare me your indifference.” Writers can’t stand rejection, but being ignored is even worse.

In the good old days when I was an editor I quickly knew when I hit a nerve because I got postcards and letters, and in extreme cases even telephone calls, from irate subscribers cancelling their subscriptions. Along with the occasional love letter, of course. These days, a few comments, and that’s it. Lately, even the spammers have been ignoring me. So why bother?

Then, yesterday, the publisher emailed me a report, complete with charts and colored graphs and percentages and all manner of wonderful (I’m sure) data I don’t even pretend to understand. The bottom line is, some people are reading this! Or at least they were. My slovenly lack of dedication and reliability has resulted in many clicking on this site and seeing nothing new, leaving within 10 seconds.

So I have resolved to do better. My goal is to have a fresh post every Friday morning.

I realize that many blogs are merely diaries of daily activities, which would be relatively easy to report — if there were any activities worthy of comment. That’s what Beyond the Sidewalks was, 30-40 years ago. But that’s when I was actually doing something, and it was only once a month. Here’s an abridged sample from the Countryside of August, 1971:

The pace I told you about last time has slackened a bit, with the heavy spring schedule behind us. Just a bit, though. Here’s a rundown on some of the latest activities at Countryside:

In early June, I was show superintendent at the Kid and Buck Show put on by the Wisconsin Dairy Goat Association… and it was fun! As you know, showing goats or rabbits isn’t really my cup of tea, even though I write about such shows for Countryside’s Rabbit World and Dairy Goat Guide. I do think showing has much to recommend it, especially for people who are really into goats or rabbits (or any other animals, for that matter). There just never seemed to be much relationship between homestead animals and show animals so far as I was concerned. Anyway, actually getting involved makes something like this more interesting, and I’m sure I learned a few things too.

Those late oats planted at Lillie’s are growing, but it’s too soon to tell if they’ll beat the heat. We have the scythe all sharpened up, so if they amount to anything, we’ll have some information on harvesting grain on a small scale.

The potatoes, beans, Jerusalem artichokes and a few other things we planted among the rocks at Stoney Brook (the bulldozer still isn’t running) are doing fine, and for some reason, the garden here at Countryside is unusually weed-free this year. We need rain badly… it’s been a very dry season right here, although rain has fallen all around us… but we’re in good shape anyway.

I don’t know if I mentioned this, but the chicks we got this year were a grab-bag… guaranteed to be heavy breeds, but that’s it. And I’m thinking of starting a chicken zoo.

We have birds I’ve only seen in pictures. Red ones, white ones, black ones, brown ones, chickens colored like pheasants, chickens with feathers on their feet, and the prize has a big mop on its head. That’s a Polish. There are Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, and Heaven only knows what else. All supposedly purebred, but a really motley assortment. Actually, it makes the chicken yard very interesting. How they shape up for the table and feed conversion remains to be seen.

My sister Gretchen was here for awhile, helping out with the gardening in the morning, and doing a little writing afternoons. Man, what a life! That’s the way I started out here, but the “business” got to be too much. I’d get bored stiff in the garden all day long, I’m afraid, and sitting at a typewriter for 40 hours a week is a ridiculous way to spend your life, so my ideal was (is) to work a few hours a day in the barn or garden or shop, work a few hours at the desk, then have some time for a swim or other relaxing exercise, and wind up the day with some non-business type reading or just plain contemplation. We manage that on a weekly basis, but not daily. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you that if you read anything this time that doesn’t quite sound like me… it’s Gret.

She was doing something on home-made noodles, which interested me because I guess I just never thought that much about noodles. I was surprised to learn you don’t bake them or anything like that: they’re just dried… paste. We were discussing this when Judy Ramsdale piped up from her corner that she makes noodles all the time. So, Gret and Judy ended up in the kitchen making noodles. Sometimes it’s a wonder how we ever get any magazines published around here, let alone three of them.

It goes on like that for another thousand words or so, about the geese we just acquired, the article on solar energy I was writing for Organic Gardening & Farming magazine (an interview with Dr. Farrington Daniels, who wrote Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy in 1964), and an overnight “vacation” spent camping at our planned future homestead in the woods (which never did pan out). And I did that every month, for 30 years.

What could I tell you about the past month? You already know about the eye surgery. I went to meetings of the Taylor County Master Gardeners, the Northern Wisconsin Hosta Society, and the Thorp Town & Country Garden club (where I put on a fruit tree pruning demonstration). Pruned a bunch of apple trees here, too. Whoopee-ding. Nothing to write home about, much less anything to share with strangers.

I can hardly wait ‘til Friday, to see what I come up with. It will be interesting.

There wasn’t a great deal of job printing in our small, southern Wisconsin village. Most of my income came from a monthly public relations flyer, or bill insert, I wrote and produced for small, mostly rural, Independent (non-Bell) telephone companies around the country. That’s why Diane’s nurse paycheck was important! This left me with ample time to be a Mr. Mom and cub scoutmaster, write, run a homestead, and play around with a little newsletter that connected me to other homesteaders.

The newsletter didn’t even have a name. It needed a return address of course, but I just used our business logo: a nice clip art drawing of a crowing rooster, followed by “the Countryside Print Shop,” leaving off the “Print Shop.” Pretty soon people were referring to it as “Countryside.”

I thought that was an awfully lame name, especially compared to a cool one like “The Mother Earth News,” which appeared at the same time. I only changed my mind some 20 years later, when the giant Hearst Corp., with the resources to find the very best magazine names in the world — think ”Cosmopolitan” and “Esquire” — came out with a “Countryside” magazine. But that’s a story for another time.

It wasn’t intended to make money. The subscription price — $1 a year and a letter asking or answering a question about self-sufficiency — would hopefully pay for the paper and postage and fill the pages. I was more than willing to provide the editing, typesetting, printing, mailing etc. in return for the knowledge I was sure I’d get from the readers. I wasn’t disappointed.

Some people still refer to Countryside as a reader-written magazine. I liked to call it participatory journalism. Today I think it was uncannily like the web, where just about anybody can share their ideas and opinions. Some people don’t like that aspect of the web today, and some didn’t like it in the magazine back then. For example, I could always expect an outburst from “experts” and professionals after I printed a letter from somebody who used mayonnaise jars or the water bath method for canning (which was much more common in the 1970s than it is today), as well as plenty of old wives’ tales. While I was accused of neglecting my duty as an editor to protect people from false information, I saw it as providing an open-minded soapbox for the little guy. It was the Extension expert who laughed and told me “People don’t make bacon: Oscar Mayer makes bacon!” It was the elderly neighbor who showed me how to make bacon. Countryside readers were my new neighbors, and added a lot more.

At the same time, there are certainly foolish people in the world, and I didn’t ignore my job as an editorial gatekeeper, either. I thought of myself as a sort of master of ceremonies: My job was to keep things moving, on track, and civil. I knew very well I was no expert on anything, and the letters from readers who were, made it easy to be humble. It was amazing to see how much expertise, on how many varied topics, was available for the asking, from people who most often didn’t have fancy degrees or titles. I learned that everybody is ignorant about many things, but everybody is an expert on at least one thing. Countryside was fortunate to be able to tap in to all that knowledge and expertise from beyond the sidewalks.

Old men like me have favorite stories we like to tell, retell, and then tell again. That often drives people crazy, especially those who are nearest and dearest to us and can’t escape.

You, on the other hand, don’t know me from a stone. You might have read one of my books (the most likely being Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats or Homesteader’s Handbook to Raising Small Livestock), but those were written many years ago. And it’s been 10 years since I, and my Beyond the Sidewalks column, dropped out of the pages of Countryside magazine, so either you’ve never heard of me or you’ve forgotten all my favorite stories. Which means I get to start over again!

One of my all-time faves is how Countryside magazine began.

I had dreamed of homesteading all my life, although we didn’t call it that back then. In the 1940s it was simply “farming.”  My uncle’s farm was typical. He milked about a dozen cows, by hand and lantern light. The milk was cooled in cans in the springhouse, which was “refrigerated” by cold water, and hauled to town by the horses, which also provided power for the field work.

There were chickens, producing eggs to eat or sell and an occasional chicken dinner. One sow furnished piglets, enough to keep the family of 12 in pork, with some left over to sell.

There was a huge garden, of course, and an orchard and berry patch. We slept on crinkly corn-husk mattresses, pumped water by hand, and hauled in wood for the kitchen range. An older cousin recently reminded me of how I hated to pick beans, but I don’t remember that: To me, everything on our summer visits was just wonderful. I wanted to be a farmer. (When I hated to pick beans was as a migrant laborer in California; but that’s another story.)

World War II changed everything. Some genius decided that all those factories making bombs and gunpowder from ammonia could just as easily make fertilizer. Many factors contributed to replacing the horses with trucks and tractors. Electricity came to the farm, chickens and pigs became specialties not to be bothered with on a dairy farm, and dairy farmers needed fancy equipment and larger herds in order to stay in business. By the mid-fifties, when I graduated from high school, the farms of my youth were nearly extinct, it took a small fortune to even get started, and it wasn’t the kind of farming I was interested in anyway. I obviously had to find some other way to make a living, and hopefully, one day I could “farm” the way I wanted to, probably as a hobby, or a sideline.

So I became a journalist, flying around the country until all airports and hotel rooms looked the same, and I decided it was time to take action.

Diane, who had been a stay-at-home mom, made use of her RN degree by getting a job in a hospital, while I quit my magazine job and became a Mr. Mom. With a home-based business, the Countryside Print Shop. And a garden, and then rabbits, and chickens, geese, goats, sheep, a pig, and a hive of bees, all on one acre, on the edge of a small town — just beyond the sidewalks.

Everything went swimmingly, and we had all of the usual first-homestead adventures: the call from the post office that the chicks had arrived, and later, a more urgent call about the bees, several of which had escaped; the thrill of the first pullet egg; the first rabbit butchering experience; the goat milk, the cheese, and all of the other pleasures and delightful experiences that come with what we began to call “homesteading.”

Then came time to butcher the pig. I had a general idea of how to do it, but couldn’t find any information on such topics as curing and smoking bacon and ham. Using my journalism experience, I did a little research and decided to call the Meat Science Department at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.

I explained what I was looking for, and there was a long silent pause. Then the guy laughed. “People don’t make bacon,” he chuckled. “Oscar Mayer makes bacon!” (I later encountered the same attitude with organic gardening, goats, and other topics, which to this day colors my attitude toward county agents, even though now some of them act like they invented all this stuff.)

When I mentioned this experience to an 85-year-old neighbor who lived just across the road, he offered to help, or at least show me what to do. And then he went into his attic and brought down his hog scraper and lard press for me to use!

The hog butchering was a success, but the wheels had started turning. Certainly there were other people who wanted to know and do the same kinds of things I wanted to know and do. There obviously were other elderly people who had the knowledge we were looking for, and who wouldn’t be around much longer to share their experience. I was a professional writer, I owned a printing press…

In the summer of 1969 I placed a $25 classified ad in Organic Farming & Gardening, a magazine I had been avidly reading for several years, and one I had written “homesteading” articles for. I offered a one-page (12” x 18”, the biggest sheet my press could handle) newsletter on “homesteading.” It was only one sheet, folded to 6” x 9”, because I had little idea of what would be in it, but also because I had been involved in magazines, and didn’t want the production hassles of anything bigger. This was going to be for my own education, not a business enterprise. Therefore the subscription price was $1 a year — plus a letter with a question, or an answer to a previous question, about self-sufficient living.

The first ad brought a few replies, the second a few more, enough to pay the postage. The only thing that kept it going was the fact that I was willing to do the editing, printing, addressing, mailing etc. for free. However, the response, even from those few readers, was so great that I soon had to add another sheet, and then so many more it became necessary to staple them into a 6” x 9” booklet, and when that got too fat for our hand stapler, we had to increase the page size to 8-1/2” x 11”.  The rest, as they say, is history.

There’s more to this, which I’ll share next time. And of course, I’ll be delighted to tell you many other stories from beyond the sidewalks.