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Hi Everyone,
We received quite a few emails and phone calls last week from people offering to help us in any way that they could—cooking meals, grocery shopping, doing chores, pulling weeds, picking lemons, planting in the garden, praying, etc. We are so grateful for the outpouring of all your love and care. The Lord has mercifully preserved us through this sickness, and Papa has fared the best. We are not 100% well yet, but we are past the “anxious” stage. Mom and I have always struggled with asthma after we get sick, and evidently this sickness is no different. If I could just figure out how to turn off the excessive sinus drainage, then I wouldn’t be coughing my head off all day long exhausting all my energy. Our minds are starting to kick back in—thinking of everything that needs to be done, but our bodies are not impressed. Thankfully we have been able to milk our cows every morning, do the morning and evening chores, and fix three meals a day—from there we don’t do too much besides relax and rest. We did accomplish a few little extras this week, but not much.
Last week I ended my journal with a few questions, and this week I have answers:
1. Will the lemons get harvested? This was one of the chores that one of you offered to come and do for us—and I was very close to saying “Yes, please do.” In the end I am glad that we didn’t get any help—because the thorns on that lemon tree are fierce! Who would have thought that you could be a bloody mess from harvesting lemons? Thursday afternoon we attempted three times to go to the garden—but alas it just was too much for us. So we decided to stay close to home and pick the lemons off the Meyers lemon tree in our front courtyard. We would reach in for a lemon—and scrape a finger on a thorn. We would grab a lemon and when it would let loose our arm would fall into a thorn. I would try ever so carefully to go slow and cautiously—but I often seemed to miss the thorn on the “other side.” We emptied the lemons off the “ground level” first, and then we grabbed a chair. When we couldn’t reach any more at that level then I grabbed a ladder. Next we grabbed a stick with a hook on it to reach those that we still couldn’t grab with our hands. It only took us about an hour to harvest the lemons, and we got about 15 five gallon buckets full.
2. Will the sweet pea and sugar snap pea seeds ever get planted? No! To my dismay I just never could get the energy to do it. I hope to do that tomorrow though.
3. Will the spring flowers ever get transplanted out of the greenhouse? No! It was supposed to freeze so bad last night that I decided that I didn’t want anything new in the garden. I hope to plant them tomorrow, or the next day, or Thursday—hopefully!
4. The onions are ready to be transplanted to the garden on Thursday—will their garden bed be weed free and composted by then? Yes and no! The family that usually helps us on Mondays came out for a few hours in the afternoon to help Steve weed the section where the onions are to be planted. They did an excellent job—and Steve said that they worked so fast that he could barely keep up with the broadforking ahead of them. The area where I plan on planting the onions is not the most fertile part of the garden; therefore I need to heavily compost it. I have plenty of chicken compost, but I could also use some mushroom compost. That requires going to town to get a load of it in the truck, and that poses a problem. It requires energy to go get it and energy to get it out of the back of the truck.
5. Will the manure spreader get fixed any time soon? Well, it definitely didn’t get fixed last week, and it is now full to the max and a pile is growing on the corner of the concrete at the milking parlor. The last time the manure spreader needed to be emptied I asked Papa to put it in my leaf bin, on top of some old pea vines. He didn’t realize that he had backed up too far and when he turned on the manure spreader the spinners grabbed the pea vines and they wrapped themselves all over the bars and broke the gear box. Papa then had to shovel it all out by hand. We thought it would be an easy fix—but alas it has been nothing but trouble. First off the bolts wouldn’t come off, the panel that covered the gear box wouldn’t come off—so things had to be cut off. Then Papa ordered a new gear box, and when it came it doesn’t fit—because the company redesigned their manure spreader and the new parts don’t fit the old machine. Oops! This requires drilling bigger holes, cutting off pipes, etc.—and all that was figured out about the time that Papa got sick.
While we harvested lemons on Thursday Papa put together a new hayrack that he had ordered for the beef cows. Their hay rack had fallen apart and he was able to find a really sturdy one at Tractor Supply—but it came in a bunch of pieces. Four of those pieces were eight foot in diameter circles that are about four inches thick. We all joked about hula hooping with it—but of course it was way too big. Papa managed to get it all put together and then Friday morning he grabbed a roll of hay with the tractor, and then he scooped up the hayrack and headed for the beef cows. Have I ever told you that cows do not like new things? Well, they do not—and this hayrack was no exception. The cows eye-bald the hay rack from a distance for a while before they deemed it safe enough to eat from.
For about the last month or so Mom and I have been reading a book together, The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I started reading it alone, but then one day Mom was around while I was reading and asked me to read out loud—and she was hooked. Trying to find time when Mom and I are both available to read is harder than finding time for me to read. The positive is that the book lasts longer, but it also takes you longer to find out what happens. As we read the book I cannot help to compare it to our times today. The book is a true story that happened in the late 1800’s in South Dakota. They had seven months of one blizzard after another—but the trouble was that the trains couldn’t get through to keep the General Stores stocked with food and supplies, the Feed Stores stocked with feed, and the coal yards stocked with coal. They had just started a new town—there were no trees for firewood, so they depended on coal. They were depended on kerosene for light. Meat was scarce because everyone was just starting to farm—so unless you brought meat with you from the East, you had to hunt. Hunting was bad because the people had scared off all the wildlife. Most of the people moved to the town for the winter—because shanties were not warm. They really didn’t have enough supplies to last them all winter, for they depended on the trains to bring them what they needed—but no trains meant no coal, no kerosene, no potatoes, no beans, no wheat, no crackers, no meat. It reminded me so much of the grocery store shelves when Covid first hit and now again as the Supply Chain is interrupted. We are a society that is depended on others to supply our needs—not just our wants. Two hundred years ago storms didn’t knock out electricity—candles and fat gave you all the light you needed. If you wanted to eat—you gardened. I will say that they did without a lot—there was not a chicken in every pot. Life was simpler—but life was harder. The more depended we are on others to supply our needs, the more vulnerable we are when normality is turned upside down.
I will admit that laying around has its advantages as I have been able to put together my garden calendar. I am not finished, but at least I have begun planning when to plant and start what in the garden. I also have finally got the Poultry processing calendar put together. I had to figure out how many chickens we sold last year, how many we need this year, and how often we need to bring in chickens and process them. The first batch arrives this week, and will be processed April 1. The plan so far is to bring in 16 batches of 50 chickens spaced out every two weeks taking off the month of July—because my paperwork over the last few years tells me that it is too hot in July. With all the calendars planned now I am sitting down with the garden seed catalogs to begin my dreaming of what to plant in the garden.
The last few nights have been quite chilly here—shall I rephrase that, they have been FREEZING COLD! Last night it was below freezing by 9:00 at night, and dropped to the low 20’s by morning. I was concerned about the broccoli in the garden. Last year’s freezes did a little damage to my big broccoli plants—but this year my broccoli plants are only 8 inches tall. I thought for sure that they would be killed. I wanted to get out to the garden to string rope on the garden tunnels to hold the plastic down on the sides (the wind was whipping it all over, and I was afraid that no heat would be able to build up inside). I also wanted to extra cover the broccoli—but alas I was too weak. I did manage to bring the baby broccoli plants inside the house, because I didn’t deem them safe in the greenhouse. When milking was done this morning I took inventory of the greenhouse and garden. The only thing that suffered in the greenhouse was the summer plants—marigolds and canna lilies. With all the warm weather we were having they had sprouted—but it got so cold in the greenhouse that the marigolds died, and the canna lilies had some of their leaves turn black. The canna lilies will come back again when it warms up, but the marigolds are finished. I have more seeds though. When I went to pull up one of the marigolds I was surprised to find the top inch of soil frozen solid. Out in the garden I was happy to find that the broccoli had survived untouched. Most of what is growing in the garden is winter crops—so they fared well. The pineapple sage was the only herb I saw that suffered—hopefully the roots were not destroyed. Only the new green growth of the lemons was harmed on the Ponderosa lemon tree in the garden, but the leaves on the Meyers lemon tree in our courtyard look a little frozen—but the tree is fine. Thankfully everything really survived nicely. I think that we have survived the worst of winter—does spring start this week? It is the first week of February!
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare