She’s Gotta Hive It: Ashley English Found a New Life Canning Vegetables, Keeping Bees

The following article is from the official Crafty Bastards Events Guide which you can pick up in this week’s Washington City Paper on stands now.

By Heather Morgan Shott

When Ashley English moved to D.C. in 1996, her aspirations didn’t include canning and preserving her own fruits and vegetables, making her own dairy products, or keeping her own bees and chickens. And they certainly didn’t include writing a series of books on the subjects. Yet she credits the District with putting her on the path toward not only living on an 11-acre Appalachian homestead, but also writing the Homemade Living guides Canning & Preserving, Home Dairy, Keeping Bees, and Keeping Chickens.

“I figured I’d eventually make my way to New York,” says the 35-year-old, who moved from Asheville, N.C., to her stepmother’s studio apartment in Foggy Bottom so she’d have a “stepping stone” to the big city and a career in fashion design. “But I got to D.C. and made some friends who were involved in kind of the left spectrum politically, and I changed my mind about wanting to become a fashion designer. I got really involved with nonprofit work, which inspired an interest in the intersection of economy and food.” English nurtured that interest by working at the Whole Foods in Arlington, Yes! Organic Market on Connecticut Avenue NW, and the now-shuttered Good Food store on 18th Street NW.

By 2000 she’d decided she missed Asheville enough to move back. Two degrees—one in natural health, the other in sociology—“a series of different odd jobs,” and work as a nutrition consultant and medical assistant at a local doctor’s office followed. English was satisfied “on a lot of levels” but still wasn’t sure exactly where she wanted to be in her life. “I knew I wanted to move a little bit closer to actually working with food,” she says, “both in the kitchen and in the soil.”

Everything finally clicked after she met her future husband, Glenn English, who happened to own land in nearby Candler, N.C. “The property…had been an organic edible-herb and -flower farm. So there were greenhouses; there was flat land,” English says. “I thought, Well, this is perfect for me. Let me figure out what I’m going to do out here.” English quit her job and started Small Measures, a blog about her life on the farm. In 2008, a close friend who’s an editor at Asheville publisher Lark Crafts invited her to write a series of books on contemporary homesteading. The idea was that English would, for the most part, learn by doing, passing that experience on to readers.

“I was like, ‘Holy crap, yes!’” recalls English. “‘That’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.’”

English immediately got to work on Keeping Chickens and Canning & Preserving, both published in 2010. The chickens would be an entirely new adventure, but canning was something she’d always known. “My grandmother Ruby was a big canner,” she says. “She had a big pick-your-own blueberry farm in Chesapeake, Va., and a big garden with her second husband, so they did lots of canning. I can recall with great clarity her making and canning grape juice in her kitchen, bread-and-butter pickles, all sorts of things.”

English’s book covers all the basics and offers recipes ranging from strawberry jam to curried-winter-squash chutney. “Canning and preserving are absolutely a cinch because you just have to acquire whatever raw material you’re using,” she says. “You turn on your stove and you’re good to go.”

Keeping chickens turned out to be a little more involved, despite English’s assertion that it’s not too different from having a house cat: “You have to feed them every day and provide them with water, and if somebody gets sick, you have to take care of that.” There were some inevitable chicken causalities along the way. “There’s undeveloped land all around us, so that makes for lots of predators that would love a chicken dinner,” she says. “We would like chicken eggs, so our chicken coop is now fortified—we call it Chicken Fort Knox.”

Once English and her husband returned from running errands and, thanks to a faulty gate latch, “saw all the chickens in the yard” at the same time their German shepherd, Buffy, did. Most of the chickens ran back to the coop when the dog began chasing them, she says, but one wasn’t so fortunate. “My dog actually ripped the whole back off of one of them,” says English, who saved the injured bird by dousing it with hydrogen peroxide and stroking it to calm its nerves. The next day, the vet gave English medicine for the chicken—and inadvertently prompted a D.C. flashback.

“I was in the chicken coop…thinking, I used to hang out at the Pharmacy Bar drinking gin and tonics and reading the Washington Post, and now I’m giving my chicken antibiotics by beak,” she recalls. “I was like, Wow, my life is really different now.”

Next came the bees. English attended beginning beekeeping classes for two years before writing Keeping Bees, published in March this year. Today she has two hives and has never been stung. “I am one of those people who always wears gloves and always wears a veil and jacket,” she says. “Some people want to…feel the bees and feel the rhythm of the buzzing and humming while they’re in there, so they go in bare-handed, and that’s when you’re more likely to be injured.”

English says her precaution is more practical than anything else. (“I use my hands all the time as a writer and a cook…I don’t really have the time to get stung.”) But wearing protective gear can have disadvantages, especially in mountainous Candler, as English discovered in the summer of 2009, when, in bee suit and rubber boots, she fled a black bear. “Fled is actually an inappropriate descriptor,” she wrote on Small Measures. “[T]rudged, plodded, and clumsily, heavily ran are much more fitting descriptions of my attempt to high-tail it back up the hill to my house.”

In the book English writes about how to harvest honey, but she says she keeps bees mainly as a way to be environmentally responsible. “For me it’s not so much about the honey. It’s stewardship for pollination purposes. The output of my garden has increased exponentially having honey bees around.”

English’s latest homesteading adventure is chronicled in Home Dairy. Making her own cheese, yogurt, and ice cream has been surprisingly easy, she says. “I think there’s this whole shroud of mystery behind homemade dairy products. The veil became very thin when I was working on that book.” One of her main challenges was finding the correct type of milk for making mozzarella—which, she says, “has to have not been ultra-heat-treated in order to get all smooth and glossy and pliant.” She ended up going through several gallons’ worth of “mishaps” before discovering the perfect product.

Next up, English says, she’s hoping to launch a second food-related book series—“a spinoff in another direction.” She declined to discuss details but says she’s also thinking of exploring merchandising opportunities for the books she’s already written. “I’d really love to have a line of really cool canning lids.”

“I feel really fortunate to live the life that I do,” she adds. “It’s like serendipity has smiled at me in a lot of different ways.”