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Hi Everyone,
They say that a dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep—I have to disagree because when I dream I am fully awake. Dreaming is one of those things that make our lives as busy as a bee. If Mom isn’t dreaming up some new idea, then I am—and woe if we are in it together. When we first started having workers and interns, someone asked Papa if we were now able to get everything done since we had extra help. Papa just told him no, because Mom just keeps coming up with new ideas. Some of those dreams take years to make them come true—but they usually do happen. Sometimes we know that we want something, but we don’t know exactly what we want it to look like, or where we want it to go. The poultry processing kitchen was one of those things. I knew that I wanted one—but we couldn’t figure out where to put it. I also have the problem of dreaming too small. When I dreamed of a processing room I wasn’t dreaming any bigger than an 8 foot by 20 foot portable building. Then one day Papa came home and told Mom and I to go look at another farmers processing building—he said that it was perfect. We agreed and we ended up with a 32 foot by 32 foot insulated metal building with a concrete floor, three rooms, running water, drainage pipes and plenty of elbow room. Hey, it was big enough to hold my sister’s wedding in it!
Another dream that I have had for years is a concrete floored and walled compost bin. We have such a problem with nut grass and Florida betony that every time we make a compost pile in the garden the weeds move in. We never could decide where to put one either. Years ago we had a three compartment compost bin made out of pallets—but we kept throwing our weed seeds in it, and you guessed it they sprouted. I will say that in that pile we grew the best tomato plants ever. They were absolutely loaded with tomatoes and the only problem was that they had not ripened by the time the first frost was going to hit. We solved the problem by having our workers pull off every single tomato and we placed them on wire shelves in our pantry and they slowly ripened and we had fresh tomatoes for months. Our next compost adventure was to build a Poultry barn that had a large compost yard where we would house old chickens and raise our fresh laying hens until they started laying eggs. These birds turn all our kitchen and garden scraps into compost—and the soil in there is so spongy. I still needed a place to store the composted chicken manure when we cleaned out the houses, and I needed a place to store all the leaves that we collect from the chestnut orchard. Back in January when we sold the old laying hens their portable house had a lot of chicken compost—and I wanted it for the garden, but I had no place to put it. I finally decided that the back corner of the garden—where nothing grows and no one drives would be the best place to put the compost bins. The added bonus was that I would put it right on the fence that bordered the pastures and Papa would be able to drive up to it with the tractor bucket full and just dump it right over the fence and into the compost bins—without having to drive into the garden. The next thing I needed was a concrete man. One morning back in March I woke up and was determined that it was the day to call the concrete man. That very day though our milking parlor contractors told us that they were pretty sure that they could drag the concrete slabs from around the old milking parlor out to the garden. The timing was perfect! It took a few weeks, but those two 8 ft. x 8 ft. slabs of concrete did find their way to the back corner of the garden. Then it took another six weeks before I woke up again one day saying “THIS IS THE DAY!” That day I called Home Depot and ordered the concrete blocks to build the walls—and that was a week ago.
Last Monday morning while we were eating breakfast the Home Depot delivery truck pulled up and dropped off three pallets of concrete blocks—186 to be exact. The goal for the week was to build those walls, clean out the chicken compost from the portable chicken house, and replace the roof on the chicken house all by Friday night. We weren’t too hopeful, but at least it was a goal. As soon as we were finished milking on Monday we headed to the garden. We (Mom, Steve, and I) grabbed our gloves and started moving concrete. May I say that we have never in our life built a concrete wall? Steve kept laughing about “women” building concrete walls. He carried the blocks for us, and we stacked them in place. May I also say that Mom didn’t want the concrete blocks cemented together just in case the compost bins don’t work out she wants to be able to dismantle the whole thing? I will not tell you how many times we built a row, or two or three and had to take them all back down because it wasn’t square, or it bowed—I cannot anyway because we lost count. Then low and behold I found out that it is not easy ordering concrete blocks over the phone. I asked for six half “O” baby blocks so that we could alternate the rows of blocks thereby causing them to lock together. Well, they sent me half blocks alright—but blocks that were halved on the rectangle instead of the square. We got blocks that were 8 x 4 x 16, instead of blocks that were 8 x 8 x 8. We could have finished the wall on Monday—even with all our rebuilds, but we had to wait until Papa could go back to Home Depot and exchange the blocks. Tuesday morning found us building the wall again—well, Steve and Mom, I decided to weed. I did go back to help once Papa got home with the correct blocks. Then we “quickly” built the wall. I say “quickly” because I let Mom use the square on her row and I just stacked the blocks on my rows. It was 2:00 when we finished, the wall was not square but it was built and our egg helpers, who are thankfully always punctual, had arrived to help us package eggs.
Thursday was a rainy and cold day. Yes, 60 degrees is cold when it is raining and you had been enjoying 80 and 90 degree weather. No one felt like working outside, so once the morning chores were done (milking the cows, feeding the birds, moving the cows and sheep) we called it quits for the day. Steve and Moises went home, Mom worked in the house, and Papa and I headed to town to buy the roofing for the chicken house.
The goal on Friday was to clean out the chicken house of all the compost, and put the roof on. When Papa finished his chores he started shoveling the chicken compost out of the chicken house—but only got it half way done. Then when Steve finished bottling the milk, Papa, Steve and Mom began to work on the roof—I weeded. The roof was very old, so it needed some extra boards put on it, and then somehow the math was done wrong and we didn’t get enough roofing panels. By the end of the day half the compost was removed and half the roof was on—we didn’t accomplish our goal, but we were a whole lot closer than we were when we started last Monday. This week we hope to finish the roof, completely clean out the floor, put in fresh bedding and move the new laying hens into their new home and out to pasture.
When you start new adventures there is always a learning curve. Since I have grown cosmos, zinnias, and sunflowers for years I didn’t expect to have any problem with them when we planted them in our cut flower garden—where we plan to cut flowers from in order to sell flowers to help brighten up people’s lives. Well—let’s just say that I might be selling flowers to “small make believe people” if things do not improve. To my dismay only about 1% of the zinnias sprouted, but at least 2/3 of the sunflowers sprouted. The gomphrena, celosia, and cosmos are all very short—but have begun to bloom. I went through the garden the other day cutting off the flowers in order to encourage growth—I probably need to feed them some seaweed and manure tea too. Anyway, I ended up with the cutest little miniature flower bouquet. I reseeded the zinnias on Friday, and we do the same with the sunflowers this week. I was also shocked to find my Roselle (Florida cranberry) plants blooming and putting on calyxes. They are only a foot tall, and usually grow to be four feet wide and five feet tall—and they bloom in September and October. I do declare that something is very strange—and it could be the weather. I mean when do you ever remember it being 48 degrees the middle of May? In the meantime I guess I shall continue to weed, plant plants, and figure out how to fertilize.
Our little skunk friend, whom we loving call—Pepe le Pew, comes out to scavenge around the fields, yard and garden most mornings and early evenings. He is living under the Poultry barn. The other night Steve had worked late and we were putting away the tools when Steve spotted Pepe coming out for his evening stroll. Steve had not seen Pepe before—just heard us talking about him and smelled him when he fed the chickens in the morning. We laughed as the ducks chased Pepe around in the pasture. Once Pepe was far enough out in the pasture then Steve and I climbed in the golf-cart to head for the house. I do have an adventuresome spirit at times, and can be a little daring—and I couldn’t resist the chance to see just how close we could get to Pepe. Steve wasn’t too enthused, but since I was driving he said that if I was going to get sprayed he guessed he would too—but I had no plans of being sprayed. As we got closer, Pepe ran faster, and soon found himself on the other side of the fence heading to hide between two of our hoop houses that we had stored for the winter on the back of the hay barn. I knew that the skunk was cornered and asked Steve if he wanted a real close up look of Pepe—he flatly told me no! We laughed and headed on up to the house—but I was determined to get up close with Pepe. That chance came Saturday night as I needed some parsley for dinner. Just as I got to the back gate I saw Pepe appear from the poultry barn heading for the garden. I was excited because I have longed to walk at a safe distance following the skunk through the garden to see what it does—or should I say see it in action because we can usually see what it did the next day (dig holes in the cucumbers, ginger, comfrey, flowers, herbs—or just walk through them smashing them down or even poop on them). This time though Pepe didn’t head straight into the garden to walk the paths, he headed behind the garden wall—so I did too. He moseyed along until he came to some fence panels leaning against the back wall. He headed underneath of them and then began his “bath”. He scratched like a dog, and preened like a cat. After five minutes I was ready to watch him move on, but he was intent on bathing. Then I heard Mom calling and I quickly grabbed my parsley and headed inside to cook dinner—well, I did take one more look at the skunk before I headed inside and he had finally moseyed on looking for food. I hope to one day get to follow him around the garden, I know he walks the pathway because he leaves little sandy footprints behind on the black rubber walkways.
It is third Sunday and Papa is off to pray with the men at church—so I must go do the evening chores. I hope that you have a lovely week.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare