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Hi Everyone,
As you scroll through YouTube lately it seems that Homemade bread is on the rise, and alternative ideas for toilet paper are rolling out. All over the country—or should I say world, people are at home with their families concocting meals from sparse pantry shelves and desperately trying to find another roll of toilet paper. This is not the time when a mother wants to find that her toddler has emptied a roll of toilet paper in the toilet, or as I read the other day—this is not the time when you want to find out that your dog has peed on your package of toilet paper. Yes, we are experiencing the “Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020”. Who would have ever thought it could happen? Yet, toilet paper wasn’t even invented until 1857. For the past few weeks I have been thinking—“So what shall we use if we run out and cannot find anymore toilet paper?” My solutions are simple: first there are four boxes of Kleenex’s in the closet, second I have 2 yards of white cotton knit that I could cut up into “reusable” toilet paper rags, and thirdly we do have a nice crop of mullein growing in the garden—it is just like Charmin (ultra-soft, and ultra-strong).
As I look out across the fields I can sense that April is around the corner—I do not have to even look at the calendar. The grass is growing faster and faster, the chestnut trees are turning greener and greener—and I think that it is time for the sheep to come and mow the lawn for the weeds are getting taller and taller and seedier and seedier. As I sit at our breakfast table I can practically watch the dandelions open and soak up the morning sunlight. I can also watch the bluebirds fly in and out of the bluebird house with their beaks full of grass and twigs as they build the first nest of the year. Hopefully this year our cat, Catapus, will leave them alone and not decapitate the mama bird while she sits on her eggs. After breakfast I head next-door to the milk house and I am most prone to leave the door open so that I can listen to the songbirds sing their little tunes of praise to their Creator, and more often than not, you will find me singing away too.
Life couldn’t be any busier right now, and there couldn’t possibly be one more thing to add to the agenda. The rush is on to get the spring garden planted by April 6—but the weeds need to be removed first, the beds need to be marked off and composted, and the walkways need to be mulched. Papa headed out twice this week to get us a truck load of wood chips. I am bound and determined to not have to spend every waking moment weeding the garden this year—well; maybe it doesn’t consume that much time. Still, I want to do everything possible to eliminate as many weeds as I can. On Friday when we wanted him to go get us some wood chips, we had just heard that if you were older than 65 it was advised that you stay home. Papa is soon to be 69, so he decided to take a nap saying that he was quarantined. When I asked him how long he planned on being quarantined, he said until after lunch. If some people can claim that getting alcohol is an essential, I will declare that gardening is more of an essential. Besides, the mulch yard is only occupied by one person, and it is outside. The garden is shaping up—but O how I want to get so discouraged every year thinking that it is an impossible task. If all we did was to take a tractor to the garden, till it up and make long rows, and then fill the rows with seeds—then we would be done in a day. Alas, that is not how we roll. We like character, beauty, organic, and style. Last year, I talked Mom into putting trellises up everywhere—seven to be exact. We grew cucumber, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, Lima beans, butternut squash, watermelon, and noodle beans on them. I found that it was too much work to train them up a trellis, and that the yield was not very bountiful—because you had to cut off over half the vines in order to get them to grow up the trellis. This year I had Papa and Steve take them all down. I will put three back up. Two trellises will go right inside the gates into the garden beds and I will grow cucumbers up them—they are smart enough to trellis themselves. A large trellis will go inside the entrance of another garden bed and I will grow Christmas Lima beans up it—for they too are smart enough to trellis themselves. Come Saturday afternoon one bed (out of 6) was ready to be planted—and we were able to get some cucumbers and cantaloupe seeds into the ground, and some broccoli and cauliflower plants transplanted into a row. There is still so much to do, and if it was all we had to do, then I would feel very confident that it would get done—but alas, there are cows to milk, eggs to package, and we start processing chickens this week which means we have to get the Poultry Kitchen all washed down and put back together since the floor is all sealed now.
Yes, we have had a lot going on here on the farm, and thankfully we have actually had a lot of help. On Monday afternoon a family of seven came over to help us. We had not been able to package all the eggs the week before, so we had about 15 five gallon buckets of eggs that needed to be packaged. Talk about an egg party—we had an egg party. We brought in a long table and we were able to work on three buckets at a time. All the eggs were done in one hour! Then half the crew headed out to pasture to round up a steer to take to the butcher and to then round up three black lambs for a man that wanted to buy them. The other half of the crew went with me to the garden. We finished putting mulch around the rose bushes and weeded the plantain, oregano, and sage bed. It was going on 5:00 when we all gathered back together and we had one last project to do. The new chickens were still camping out in the poultry barn making compost—a place they were only supposed to be until they started laying eggs. Needless to say, we have not had the time, energy, or weather conditions to get it done. It is a chore that needs to be done at night—when we are too tired after a long hard day of work. When we mark the calendar to do it—then the clouds decide to rain. The children were very excited about the prospect of catching chickens—especially the roosters. So we made a “people wall” and we drove the chickens out of the compost yard and into the poultry barn. Then mom brought the portable chicken house up and in fifteen minutes all 110 birds were transferred from the barn to the chicken house. What a blessing! The next day we made the mistake of not moving the chicken house very far from the poultry barn—and the chickens spent all day trying to figure out how to get back inside the compost yard. There were about 15 birds that did figure out how to fly over the six foot wall and get back in. The next day Papa took the chicken house way out to pasture—and all went well after that.
On Tuesday a young lady from Gainesville came up to help us in the garden for a few hours. The extra two hands made the weeds disappear even faster. Tuesday morning Steve met us with the news that he had been laid off from his other job. He works weekends at a campground that take tubes, canoes, and kayaks down the Ichetucknee River. The campground also has cabins and RV hook-ups. On Monday the state park that the Ichetucknee River runs through was closed due to the Coronavirus. This brought the campgrounds business practically to a halt—and Steve was notified that they would not need him for a long while. So Steve asked us if we could give him more hours to work. We said sure, as long as the Lord supplies the funds to pay him. Now Steve works Monday through Saturday (with Wednesday’s and Saturday’s being half days). This will really help us get a lot more done in the garden, and once the garden is planted we should be able to tackle many other projects. On Wednesday’s Steve always collects the eggs for Mom and me before he goes home. Then all we have to do is feed the heifers, Flag the bull, Yasha the dog, and separate the calves from the milk cows. Papa says it is real easy to separate the calves, but for some reason or another, we seem to have trouble. (Although, as I was sitting here typing earlier I noticed that Papa was having some trouble himself, the calves kept running up and down the lane instead of going into the barn like good little calves.) Anyway, last Wednesday night Mom and I were in charge—or so we thought. The cows were spending the day in the hay field, and the night in the green grass field. Papa says to always let everyone out, and then the calves will go to the barn and then you can direct the cows to the green field. Wednesday night the green field that they were to go into was across the lane from the hay field. Mom and I thought that we could manage all the wires and let only the cows out, keeping the calves back. All was going perfectly until one calf darted through with the cows. Oops! We only had two more cows to go, but alas we had to go to plan B. We closed up the wires to the green field and we were going to let the last of the cows and the calves out so that we could shoo the calves down to the barn, and then we would bring back the last few cows. Right before we opened the wires, the wind blew the panels that were blocking the lane so that the calves had to go into the barn and so that they couldn’t go running down the lane to the rest of the 65 acres. Mom went down to stand the panel back up—but she had to disconnect all the hot-wires first, because the metal panel had landed on them. Once she was set back up, I let the calves out. They ran down to the barn, and Mom was able to run the two cows back. In the meantime, the one little calf came running up out of the cow field like he wanted to go join the other calves. I managed to guide him out of the field, but before I could get the hotwire picked up off the ground, he walked over it and ran back out into the field with the cows. It took both Mom and I to chase that little bull calf back out of the field and into the barn.
On Saturday afternoon the family of seven returned to help us out some more. The first thing we all did was to move the broiler chicks from the brooder house to the portable hoop house in the pasture. Then they pulled up all the broccoli plants—they had finally reached the end of their production period, and were producing more flowers and seed pods than broccoli and leaves. Mom marked off one of the garden rows with the gridder, and I put a baby broccoli or cauliflower plant in the proper places, then everyone pitched in to plant them. Finally we moved the chickens that were weeding the garden for us, back to the poultry barn so that they could eat the broccoli plants that we pulled up and all the good weeds that we will be pulling up. The help has been a real blessing as there is so much to do.
That wraps up our week, and now I must get my rest so that I have the strength and energy to tackle the tasks that lay ahead of us this week.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare