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Hi Everyone,
Well, the shortest month of the year has come and gone----which also means that my favorite month of the year is gone for another twelve months. March is here and the winds are blowing good and strong. I think that it is kite flying season. The hardest thing about March is that you get cold snaps after we have had such nice spring weather.
With all this beautiful weather that we have, it is harder to stay inside and package eggs or cream the milk---Yet, tis the season for lots of eggs and lots of milk. When we cream the skim milk either goes spread out on the pastures as fertilizer, or we let it sit out until it separates into curds and whey. Monday morning we had to hang last weeks “cheese” and we got lots of beautiful clear yellow whey. Once that job was done, we headed for the garden. We were supposed to plant the Irish potatoes last Saturday, but we had company, and we didn’t even have the beds weeded. Therefore, Steve, Mom and I headed to the garden to weed. Well, I weeded by myself for a bit, while Steve and Mom pruned the fig and pear trees. We weeded until about 4:30 (except for a lunch break and a lamb feeding break). Then I practiced my piano and cooked dinner.
Tuesday we spent most of the day in the milk house---chomping at the bit to get back to the garden. After we milked the cows, we creamed the milk and we bottled the kefir and the rest of the whey. While Steve and I worked in the milk house, Mom was busy pruning on the Meyers lemon tree and her rose bushes. Then I made the yogurt and we packaged the eggs. Around 3:30 we had packaged as many eggs as we could, and Mom had to work with the Poultry Kitchen builder. Steve and I made a dash for the garden and finished weeding the potato beds and harvested the veggies for Wednesday’s delivery. When we got inside I took some time to play the piano before I cooked dinner. I finished my day putting together the orders and making the receipts for the Jacksonville delivery the next day.
Wednesday found us cleaning the house for company, and getting the cows milked and the orders packed so that Papa could deliver all the goodies to those in Jacksonville who were happily awaiting their yummy vittles fresh from the farm. The Poultry Kitchen was finally declared finished---as in all the walls are standing, the roof is on top, all the windows are in, and all the doors are installed. A few pieces of trim need to be replaced with better trim, and a few leaks need to be plugged---then we are off to sealing the concrete floor, installing the electrical and plumbing, and getting all the sinks and tables. We have six weeks until the first butchering of the season----and we may just be hooking up to extension wires and water hoses. Time will tell how fast the other things can get accomplished----or shall I say the bank account will tell how fast they get accomplished.
Thursday morning Mom and I headed out to milk the cows after we had our breakfast. Well, it wasn’t exactly after we had breakfast, for Papa had to go pick up Moises, Mom had the dishes to do, and I had the milking equipment to put together. When Papa got home he helped Mom bottle feed the lambs. Then we milked the cows. After milking Mom and I bottled the milk then I made kombucha while Mom continued to prune on the lemon tree. After lunch we grabbed up the basket of potatoes that we had harvested in the fall, and headed to the garden to plant them. We shall see how this works. Last spring we bought seed potatoes from the local seed store. Then when we harvested them, we only got around to canning one of the boxes. Pretty weather and forgetfulness caused the other box to start to sprout. So come late summer I decided to plant them. When the freezes of December hit we harvested them. They really did not have long enough time to grow, but we did get a half of a bushel of new potatoes. I sent a bagful home with my sister, and the rest I saved to plant our spring garden with. If they do---then we shall be blessed. If they do not do---then we shall still be blessed because we still have a nice stash of canned potatoes. Therefore, this spring will be our experiment to see if you can get a good harvest from potatoes that we saved instead of buying new stock. I read up on it, and it does work, but you should make sure that the potatoes are sprouting before you plant them. I didn’t have time for that---so hopefully they will still sprout now that they are six inches under in the dark rich soil. Planting them was a labor of love---a love of gardening. We strung our wires so that we could reshape the beds---dodging all the ant homes on the south side of each of the four beds. We definitely got our share of ant bites. Once the beds were all prepared I spaced out the potatoes. I had sat on the living room rug and divided all the potatoes into four bags (we have four potato beds). I had thirty in each bag, and with three rows in each bed, I put ten potatoes per row. They are supposed to be planted a foot apart, but I probably leaned more toward eight inches---I wanted to plant all of them and the beds were only about six and half feet long. When all the potatoes were evenly laid out in straight rows, we began to dig our holes by hand---because I had forgotten to bring the posthole digger. After a few holes, we realized that we would not be able to endure---so we went after the compost turner. It didn’t work at all. We tried a long narrow trench shovel, but it too was requiring a lot of strength. So we headed to the barn for the posthole digger. Mom dug one hole, and we found out that we didn’t have the strength to bury it deep enough to make a hole for the potatoes. We tried our hands again---but digging a hole six inches deep, 60 times each was not going to work. Not to mention, that once we got to the anthills we would be eaten alive if we dug the holes with our hands. So we went back to the trench shovel. Mom did half, and I did the other half. The idea was to bury the shovel as deep as we could, pull back on it, and pick it up just enough to create a hole that the other person could then drop the potato in before the dirt was allowed to fall back in on top of it. After a while we accomplished our goal and headed inside to cook dinner and crash for the night.
The weatherman had originally predicted rain for Friday, then come Friday morning the prediction was gone and the sun was shining brightly. Once the milking was done and the kefir was bottled, Mom and I headed to the garden to weed---our favorite pastime. This time we had the goal to weed the Vidalia onions---all four beds. Before we headed to the onions though, we weeded one of the flower beds. The weeds in the onion beds were of the finest specimen of weeds. They were not too big or too small. They came up easily, and they were perfectly spaced. If all weeds could takes notes and behave the same way. J On the edges of the beds though, that nasty Florida betony was growing and we had to really work to get it up---though I promise we left a lot of little white roots that will sprout again. The last onion bed was the hardest to weed because some of the rye grass seeds had landed in the onion bed and sprouted. Not only had they sprouted, but we didn’t get around to weeding them when they were small, and they were now well established grasses. In the end we had four perfectly weeded raised onion beds. We came in and I made yogurt and we ate lunch---a quick one because we had a farm tour at 2:00. I was glad that the weatherman had cancelled the rain prediction, since we had a farm tour with a new customer. Low and behold though, the sky grew dark, the winds picked up to 36 mph, and right before the clock struck 2:00 the heavens opened up and we received close to a quarter of an inch in a very short amount of time. Our new customer arrived right on time, and we started our tour in the milk house. An hour later when the rains had let up some---but were still falling, Papa took the man for a tour of the farm in Papa’s farm truck. I love living on the farm, and I love just as much sharing my life with others. This young man had been raised in the city, and he had never seen a cow or a chicken before. As he and Papa walked through the garden seeing all the beauty and smelling all the herbs, he found out that some herbs smell like chewing gum (Double Mint). It wasn’t hard to convince this new customer to allow us to be his farmers. Once he left, Papa headed for the evening chores and Mom and I headed to town to run some errands. On my “to get” list was some Scarlet Nantes carrots. They say that they are the sweetest when grown in the spring---and Tuesday is a good root crop day. We left the house at 4:30, and Papa called us at 7:00 wondering where we were. We were sitting at the drive thru of Panera Bread---our favorite restaurant when we need help with a meal. When Papa asked what was taking so long we had to admit that we had a lot of places to go, and that there was all kinds of “window” shopping or garden magazines to look at in Publix and Tractor Supply. We were home before 7:30 with a nice hot meal though.
Saturday’s are sometimes relaxing days and sometimes very busy days. Yesterday was one of those mixed days. I was very busy all day (milking, packing the order, harvesting veggies, making receipts and doing laundry), but I was semi relaxing in the afternoon as I planned the spring garden which required going through all my bags of seeds to see what I have and what I need. Then I had to look through the garden catalogs to see what varieties we wanted to grow. According to the garden almanac, it looks like the good days for planting the spring garden are March 14th and 15th. I am a little concerned about that though, because I do not want to have to protect them from freezes in late March—or the possible frosts of April. The rules of planting in this area are to plant after the 15th of March, for you should be home free after that. The other rule of nature is that we usually get the last cold snap Easter weekend. This year Easter falls around the end of April, yet if we wait until the next good planting day for the spring garden it would be April 11th, and that would be too late because the bugs would eat the plants before we got to eat the produce. So, we are aiming to plant the 15th of March, and will hope for the best----that is all you can ever do anyway. Man sows the crop, and God gives the increase. Now I just have to get the seeds ordered, and we all have to get the ground tilled, weeded, and the beds marked off ready to drop the seeds into the fertile soil.
That was our week, and a peek into what is coming up here on the farm---weeding, weeding, and more weeding. The garden is an absolutely gorgeous place to be right now though with all the flowers in bloom.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare