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Hi Everyone,
A few weeks ago I started reading Joel Salatin’s book Fields of Farmers. It is about teaching the next generation of young people how to farm by bringing them onto your farm to work beside and learn from you. This is a direction we are heading into, and we have a young man who has practically grown up helping out on our farm planning to apprentice with us just as soon as some logistics can be worked out. Once he is trained we would like to have interns—but things do not always go as planned. Last Saturday we got an email asking if we could use the help of an intern for a few months. Of course we could use some help! We are not exactly set up for interns yet (we have no separate living quarters for them), but we do have empty bedrooms and an extra bathroom in our house. So on Monday after Mom and Steve spent the day mowing in the garden, Papa spread out skim milk on the pastures, and I planted seeds in the greenhouse we cleaned our stuff out of one of the bedrooms to make room for our new intern. Clayton arrived Tuesday around 1:00. While he settled in, I made yogurt and everyone else packaged eggs. I was so looking forward to helping with the eggs—but alas the yogurt had reached its proper temperature and it was time to add the culture and pour it into the containers. Everyone seemed to finish what they were doing around the same time and then we all headed to the garden to plant some green beans and some cucumbers. As of this morning some of those green beans have sprouted!
Wednesday morning Clayton went with Steve to do the chores. Clayton has been working on a farm for the last eight months so some chores are familiar to him—and some are new (or done a little different). Steve was more than excited to have help moving the chicken hoop houses—they are not too heavy that a man cannot move them, but they are not the easiest thing to move. Steve and Clayton took turns moving the hoop houses, and then there was the duck house. The chicken houses are 8 by 9 feet, but the duck house is 9 by 17 feet. Steve teasingly told Clayton that it was his turn to move the duck house and when Clayton walked up to move it (19 year old strength has no limits), Steve burst out laughing and Clayton had a good laugh too as he realized that Steve was teasing about moving the house by hand—for the duck house is not moved by hand, but by the Gravely (it is just too heavy). The young man that built the duck house moved it on the concrete right after it was built, and he said, “I moved it, but I do not ever want to do it again.” Thursday morning Clayton helped Mom and me with the milking. He has milked before—but every farm has different techniques and methods, and on our farm our goal is to have clean milk that lasts a month. Twenty-three years ago when we had our windmill installed the family that installed it raised goats in Ohio. We told them that we didn’t like goat’s milk because of the “goaty” flavor. They told us that goat milk should not have a goat flavor and that if it does the milking and bottling process was not done in a clean manor. They told us that their goat milk would last thirty days without ever getting a strong flavor—we were shocked, but challenged. We applied the principles that they told us about to the milking of our cows and we can rejoice when a customer tells us that they visited their daughter at Thanksgiving and took milk with them. Then they visited their daughter again at Christmas and found some milk in the back of the fridge that they had left behind a month earlier—and it was still fresh. Wow!
Just as we finished eating lunch on Thursday the delivery truck showed up with a pallet containing a one ton tote of chicken feed, plus a few extra bags added on top. Thankfully the semi-truck has an electric pallet jack and the driver can unload our pallet of feed with ease and wheel it into our garage and put it right where we need it. This time we had a pallet with an almost empty bag right where the new pallet of feed needed to go. So the driver set the new pallet off to the side and then took the electric pallet jack over to the old pallet and drove under it and started to move the pallet out of the garage—and then Mom saw something that made her shout, “STOP!” Catalina, our cat, had been sleeping under the pallet and was now stuck between the jack and the pallet. The driver stopped and Mom reached down to see if the cat needed help getting out—and the cat was so scared, hurt, and mad that she opened her mouth big and bit Mom in her right forearm. OUCH! The cat then managed to get out and disappeared to who knew where until that night when she came in for dinner. I have not seen her protecting the pallets of feed from mice for the last few days—and I am hoping that she gets over her fear of the pallet soon, but hopefully she won’t go back to sleeping under it. Mom on the other hand is suffering badly. She washed her wound for a long time, and then she washed it out with hydrogen peroxide. Then we coated the bite wounds with my Black Drawing Salve and another salve that I had made that was loaded with goldenseal and myrrh. She is soaking it twice a day in warm water that has Epson salt, garlic and apple cider vinegar in it. The muscles are hard, red and swollen—and painful. Her fingers are tingly and it hurts to use her arm. At night we wrap it in a poultice of bentonite clay and goldenseal—in order to pull the toxins out. Some of the swelling has gone down, and some of the bites look better, but the arm is still hot and two of the puncture bites are pretty hard. We are praying for God’s mercy on her because she is so allergic to antibiotics that going to the hospital to help fight infection is really not an option. Thankfully we have Clayton right now who can help do things that Mom usually does—but shouldn’t be doing right now.
Once things calmed down Thursday afternoon we all headed to the garden to tackle an overgrown bed. Last year we had planted a cut flower garden in that bed, and all five rows were covered with plastic to keep the weeds down. Well, this year came along and we only got around to planting one row with snapdragons and then the bed was taken over by weeds and flowers that came up from last year’s plants that had gone to seed. Those zinnias, celosia and sunflowers came in grand handy when we were asked to supply 14 flower arrangements for a graduation party. Anyway, everything was turning wild and Mom needed the bed cleaned out so that she could advance more with her new garden design. We plan on calling the new area “Martha’s Vineyard” because she got the design from Martha Washington’s kitchen garden at Mount Vernon and she plans on planting her grapes in there. Papa went in with the weed eater with the saw blade on it and cut down all the weeds (summer weeds are no small thing). Then Steve and Clayton raked the weeds out of the bed into piles that we could later pick up and take to the compost heap. Mom and I began to pull up the plastic weed cloth—but it was no easy feat. The weeds had actually started to grow through the plastic so it was not easy to pull up the plastic. Steve and Clayton brought their muscles over and that plastic soon found its way out of our garden. Once the piles of weeds were taken to the compost then we all grabbed a shovel and started digging up all the big root balls that were left behind. It was amazing to see how much can get done in a short amount of time when you have so many helping hands.
Clayton headed home to visit his family for the weekend and Mom lay low—besides doing dishes and milking cows. I fertilized in the greenhouse—where I was excited to find that the collards, bok choy, broccoli, and cauliflower had sprouted. Saturday afternoon we tackled the kitchen. We had caned so much that our counters had disappeared. So we found storage for the jars, and put away everything else that had found its way to the counters (like saved garden seeds that were hanging out in bowls and jars). We now have our counters back!
Today Mom strolled through the garden and found a handful of purple muscadine grapes ripe for the eating, a handful of ripe Everglade tomatoes, some over grown okra (which means that the okra is finally producing), the green beans were sprouting—and deer tracts in the sweet potato bed. Last year was the first year we have ever had to deal with rabbits in the garden, and evidently this year will be the first year we have to deal with deer. Thankfully it didn’t eat all the sweet potato vines—and I hope and pray it never does. No one ever said that gardening is easy.
I hope that you have a good week—August is half way over and have you noticed “Fall” is very much in the air of late!
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare