355
Hi Everyone,
The ebb and flow of farming is very fascinating to me. I wouldn’t trade farming for all the money that a 9 to 5 job could bring me—for money can’t buy everything. In my mind a 9 to 5 job can be summed up like this: be at work at 9, do the same thing all day, leave work at 5, repeat tomorrow. Farming has seasons, it has times, and it has ebb and flow. Yes, we milk the cows daily, we rotate the animals daily, there is always garden work to do, and the To Do List is always a mile long—but there are those things that happen seasonally and some every day that are constantly changing. Did you know that the sun comes up at a different time every day, and sets at a different time too? While it might get dark at 6:00 in the fall, come winter the days start getting longer and by summer we are locking the chickens up at night after 9:00. If you miss the full moon rising at 6:00 one night, it will be 7:00 the next night. Come fall the migratory birds start flying past our house heading south and once there is a glimpse of spring they start heading north—even though it is still winter up there. Farming has its seasons too, and I do not mean winter, spring, summer, fall—but planting, harvesting, and pruning. Come January we start to see smoke clouds in the sky as different farmers burn off their fields, then come summer you can drive past those fields and smell the fresh cut grass, and then a few days later after the sun has dried the grass you watch the tractors turn dried grass into rolls and bales of hay. There is a time when the sheep lamb, and the cows calve; when eggs hatch and roosters learn to crow. Yes, the Bible says it well in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
Here on the farm we are harvesting winter greens, carrots, and onions from the garden; lambs are being born almost daily; we are planning, preparing, and planting for the spring garden, and finding surprises in the pastures. Tuesday as Steve and I were heading out to work in the garden we drove past the heifer field and saw one of the heifers off by herself laying stretched out like she was in labor—but she was only a young heifer. We stopped to investigate and to my dismay, sure enough she had an udder, and she was pushing. We came back to the house to check out our paperwork. Rosy just turned 18 months old, which meant that she got pregnant when she was nine months old. Oops! Teenage pregnancies happen on the farm too. Thankfully Rosy and her little bull calf are doing just fine.
Wednesday night as I headed out to do chores I came face to face with one of the ebbs and flows of life—the sun is setting later. I had gotten used to heading outside at 5:30 to do the evening chores—which means feed the dogs, close up the garden tunnels, lock up the ducks and lock the chickens up for the night. Everything can be done in the day light—but the chickens will not go to bed until it gets dark. That was happening around 6:00, but this week I found out it is around 6:30. Since I arrived early, I decided to encourage the chickens to go to bed inside the house instead of on the feeders outside. Usually we have to pick up about 20 of them and put them to bed. So I began to shoo them off the feeders and one by one they climbed the ramp to the henhouse. Perfect! Well, almost perfect. By the time it was dark I had all but one chicken inside—and it refused to “walk the plank” even though there was no shark waiting to eat it. So I tried to catch it—but it just ran through my hands. Round and round I went with it as it went from one side of the house to the other—and underneath! After about 15 minutes of this I had a brilliant idea. One of the marketing pitches for the Olight flashlight that I have says that it is good for self-defense—all you do is shine the very bright LED light into the attacker’s eyes and then they cannot see anything. So I decided to use it on the chicken, and guess what—she froze and I was able to pick her up and put her to bed. Yippee!
Another seasonal thing we do on the farm is tidy up the garden. Come winter it is time to prune the roses, weed the beds, clean up the walkways, and feed the beds with compost and then mulch around the plants. On Monday we spent the entire day in the garden digging, pulling, shoveling, and pushing. I pruned back a creeping juniper—and time will tell whether I killed it or not (Mom wasn’t the happiest about my pruning method). Once the juniper was pruned I weeded the bed, and then I dug up all the daylilies in the bed. We then add some compost and filled the whole bed with the divided lily plants. Steve was busy shoveling the dirt, leaves and weeds out of the walkways—when he wasn’t bringing us a wheelbarrow load of compost or woodchips. In the bed beside the lilies, Mom and I both worked at removing the elderberry that had creeped in. Then Mom divided the agapanthus, pruned the lemon balm, and mulched the bed. When 4:30 rolled around we were exhausted!!!!!!!!! Mom and Pa had a financial meeting, and I had mercy on Steve and sent him home. I decided to lock up the ducks and separate the calves by myself. My legs and feet hurt from kneeling all day—so I was not looking forward to walking through the fields to round up the claves. I decided to drive the Gravely to the other end of the pasture where the calves were, and they were very frisky and quickly took off to the other side of the field where the wire was open for them to head out to their bedtime corral. To my utter dismay when the claves got to the opening, instead of heading out, they turned and ran back to the other end of the field. We did this twice on the Gravely with a lot of running around on foot too. I finally abandoned the Gravely and walked back and forth until I got the calves out of the field. Once they were locked up for the night I was so tired, and in so much pain that I was so glad that I had already locked up the ducks and closed down the tunnels—for all I wanted was a shower and my pajamas. With company in the house that meant that I would spend my evening in my room—which was no problem to me since I was too tired to cook dinner, and this would give me an opportunity to sit down and go through gardening books, make lists of what plants survived all the hard freezes and what plants went dormant or died. It was 8:00 before our company left and I was grateful for left over chili and already shredded cheese—dinner was done in ten minutes!
Tomorrow is February 1st and the beginning of my favorite month of the year—things start blooming and the weather gets very delightful. Everyone is dreaming of spring—and with the recent rains things are turning green. When I say everyone is tired of the cold and the grey skies—I mean everyone! One morning I headed out to milk and found all the sheep in the yard. Papa was with them so my first thought was that he was moving them from one field to another. Then I saw them eating the green grass growing beside the barn, and I thought that maybe Papa had let them out to eat some green grass—but then I heard Papa calling them and I realized that they had escaped. I ran to the feed room for a bucket of alfalfa and headed over to their field shaking the bucket and calling the sheep. They all came running, and we soon had them back in their field—but their guard dog, Yasha, was missing. I ran down the driveway just in time to see her head up the neighbor’s driveway. Could you please tell me why a dog has selective hearing—and only listens when they are on your property? We called and called, but Yasha acted like she never heard us. I had to follow her all the way up the neighbor’s driveway before I finally got her caught. Two days later I headed out to milk and the cows were in the yard. A gate that is never opened, had been left open, and it only took the cows two seconds to find it—and another two seconds to find the green grass on the other side of the barn. Once we got them out of the yard, it was into another field that was full of green weeds—they ran bucking and jumping running from one mouth full of greenery to another mouthful of greenery. Yes, the animals are tired of hay! I think come tomorrow we can start putting the milk cows into the winter green oats and barley grasses for about an hour a day—if they are left too long they will get sick enough to die.
Our new chickens are laying eggs and are ready to be moved out to pasture—but the old two and three year old chickens were still occupying the henhouse. I have wanted to sell them off for the last month—but keep forgetting to advertise. Then Thursday I was in the house around noon with extra time on my hands and started looking through my notebook of “To Do’s.’ I came across “advertise chickens,” and decided to act immediately. I put four listings on Craigslist: Orlando, Jacksonville, Gainesville and Lake City, and within 30 minutes I had a phone call of someone who wanted 100 of them, we had around 180. He came that night around 7:00 and ended up getting 80 of them. Friday afternoon we sold ten more, then Saturday afternoon we sold eight more, and around 8:00 that night we sold another thirteen. The first buyer is returning tomorrow night to get the rest—or close to the rest of them. We praise the Lord for such a quick sale—usually it can take a while. So this week we shall have to clean out the henhouse and transfer the new chickens to their new home where they can roam the pastures by day.
Friday afternoon we headed to town to do some shopping—since Covid hit we do not go very often, which is very nice. I really don’t like shopping anyway, but I had a list of things that we needed. We needed seed potatoes to plant the Irish potatoes this week or next, and while at that seed store I found some lavender pansies—just like I tried growing but never sprouted. Mom found some strawberry plants. Our next stop was Lowe’s where we needed a toilet seat. We found no toilet seat, but we visited the discount shelves and came out with some dianthus, two coral drift roses, a gardenia, and some mauve pansies. We also bought a clay strawberry pot. We then headed over to Walmart to get some new rags for cleaning eggs, and towels for the milking equipment. To my delight we also bought about 120 gladiola bulbs of all different colors. Mom then dropped me off at Publix to get some groceries while she ran into Home Depot to look for a toilet seat and get some vermiculite. She found the vermiculite—but still no toilet seat. It was dark by the time we got home and while Mom dealt with the groceries, I cooked dinner.
It is now quite late and I must close and go get some beauty sleep for tomorrow we start a new routine. When we get up at 6:00 we will head straight outside to milk the cows so that we can be out of the way when the Crane Contractors show up to start working on our new milking parlor. Milking will be crazy for a few weeks, but in the end we shall have a really nice parlor that will not rot because it will be made out of concrete and metal.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare