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Hi Everyone,
We haven’t had a lot of rain this week—but we have watched a lot of storms roll in and the wind pick up and the sky turn black with lightning flashes and loud booming thunder. One afternoon Mom and I tried to sit on the porch and enjoy the weather and read a book. I know that we got to enjoy it for at least fifteen minutes but then the rain arrived and it was blowing on us and we had to retreat inside. Truthfully I have spent far too much time inside the last two weeks and last Monday I was dying to go to the garden and weed. So when I was done milking the cows and answering emails I grabbed my gloves, a hat, and some water and headed to the garden. Mom and Steve were working on mowing around the garden and I grabbed my hori-hori knife, some trellising clips, and a weed bucket and started trellising up the cherry tomatoes that had been neglected so long that they were sprawling all over the ground. I got half of the tomatoes trellised and couldn’t go any further until I removed some weeds (so I could find the tomatoes—BUT, Mom found me. I have been recovering from the aggravation of an old neck injury and I have been dealing with my arms going numb, tingly and aching. Papa doesn’t want me doing anything strenuous until it all calms down. I was doing somewhat better and was hoping to gently pull some weeds (although honestly I do not know how “gently” weeds can be pulled). Anyway, just as I was burying my hori-hori knife into the ground to dig up some dreaded betony (rattlesnake weed) Mom looked over and asked what I was doing. I told her, “Trellising tomatoes and pulling some weeds.” She told me that I could trellis tomatoes, but I could not pull weeds. Ugh! That is about like telling a kid he can’t have a piece of candy. Since the rest of tomatoes were in the weeds, I knew that my garden work was over. It was lunch time anyway. After lunch I tried to think of something that I could do that didn’t require the use of my neck or shoulders and that rule cancelled out ironing, vacuuming, playing the piano and sewing. It is terrible when you have the time to do something but not the ability. I did manage to put six spaghetti squash in the oven so that we could freeze them for future meals, and while they cooked I answered emails and sat down and read a farming book.
We are still swimming in milk and Tuesday found us creaming once again. Then there was kefir to bottle and yogurt to make. There was also an egg party to attend but because of my neck and arms I stayed inside and worked on gathering together all the seeds that I plan to plant between now and November. I got them all thrown into a basket, now I just need to sort them out according to when I will plant them. The goal is to be able to grab a bag and plant when the right time arrives. It was almost time to start dinner when some people we knew showed up with some people we didn’t know. That is honestly our best “business marketing plan”—friends tell friends who tell family who tell family who tell friends and more family about us. The new family was 100% city folks—and they were not ashamed to admit it, but they were very, very excited to be on the farm and were amazed with all the space and beauty. I took them for a tour around the farm in the Gravely and they got to see the cows, chickens chestnut trees and sheep. We even did a little bit of mud bogging around the pond—because I thought that it had dried up (but it hadn’t), and I thought that it wasn’t too deep (but it was), but we made it through with mud flying thankfully everywhere but on us. When we got back they eagerly filled their coolers with some farm goodies and headed home to only return a short while later as they wanted to pick up a few more items for themselves—and some more things for some of their friends back in the city (friends telling friends who tell more friends about us).
Wednesday morning we got a phone call from the Post Office saying that they had two boxes of chicks for us—one box had 55 turkeys for us, and the other had 72 broiler chicks. Yes, we did decide to raise Thanksgiving turkeys after all. A friend picked them up for us and then we were able to get them settled into their new home. The chicks will spend two weeks in the brooder house before they are moved out to pasture, but the turkeys will spend a month before they are big enough and strong enough to head out to pasture, then it will be another month before the doors of their hoop house is opened during the day and they can roam the pastures freely. Until a turkey gets about a foot tall they are susceptible to dying from anything and everything, then when they get a foot tall they are almost invincible. As Wednesday evening rolled around the clouds began to darken with a brewing storm. Mom mentioned locking up the ducks, but first I wanted to let Aliya out to roam and play a little bit. Yes, she was a bad girl a couple of weeks ago and was caught eating a chicken. She is only five months old, and so we removed her from the chickens and placed her in “time out”. Aliya is so sweet, energetic and playful. One of her favorite pastimes is to fetch a tennis ball. We throw it, and she runs after it, grabs it up and comes back to us when we take the ball back out of her mouth and throw it again. It is good exercise for her and when she is tired of running around she will run back into her kennel or she will go and hop in the golf-cart hoping for a ride. Papa has started taking her with him in the afternoons to do the chores—gather eggs. This gives him an opportunity to train her that the chickens are ours—not hers. When she was a smaller puppy the chickens chased her around, but somehow the tables got turned. Anyway, back to Wednesday night. I played with Aliya a little and then I grabbed the duck food and Aliya and I loaded up into the golf-cart to go lock up the ducks. Mom was checking on the baby chicks and turkeys and closing up the brooder house door so that it wouldn’t rain inside. I asked her if she wanted to go with me and she said only if she didn’t get wet. The storm looked like it was still a ways off so I convinced her to go with me. We made it to the back pasture when large rain drops began to fall. The closer we got to the duck pen the harder it began to rain. I parked the golf-cart at an angle to keep the rain off of Mom and I jumped out to lock up the ducks—that were waddling ever so slowly. I stood inside their house out of the rain waiting for the last four to come around the pen—but they wouldn’t come. I had to go out in the rain and run them around the house and inside so that I could lock them all up. Then we quickly headed to the house—but not as quickly as I wanted to drive because the grass was so tall and there was hidden bull holes (of which I found one). Once we were back inside we needed a change of clothing—because we GOT WET!
Thursday we creamed the milk again and then I had to strain the whey off of the curds and hang the curds to drip for 24 hours. I then came inside and sat down at the computer to start changing everything (accounts, newsletters, business receipts, etc.) over to our new email address. Two weeks ago when we woke up our email was missing in action. We spent close to 30 hours on the phone with computer techs trying to resolve the problem, but getting nowhere. I ended up having to open up a new email account and I had given up hope of ever seeing our old email account again. I opened up an old email in our Microsoft Outlook and was just fixing to push the “unsubscribe” button when I noticed that the little bar that registers new emails coming in was building slowly and had not cancelled itself out saying that the request was impossible. I sat there and watched as emails started to pour in. YIPEE!!!! Our email was working again! Praise the Lord! The whole time our email was missing in action Psalm 50:15 kept running through my mind— “call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.” That is just what we did and God did deliver our email back to us and now we give HIM all the glory. I thought that we would have over 100 emails since we hadn’t been able to check our email for two weeks—but evidently while our email was down people couldn’t send us emails either. So we only had two days of emails to take care of. For the most part all the ordering did go smoothly for the two weeks that we didn’t have our normal email address. The first week we used the phone and the second week we opened up a new email address. Out of close to 100 orders, only four people placed an order that we never found and therefore never packed and therefore wasn’t there for them when they showed up to pick it up. I was glad that it was only four, but I still felt sorry for those four. I was so excited to get our old email account back—and just in the nick of time! I was not looking forward to changing our email address with every company and customer we do business with and every newsletter we get—not to mention our business cards, website, Facebook, and YouTube. There was one nice thing though about the Gmail account—I could send all the receipts out with the click of a button. Outlook always gave me troubles sending out receipts. So we decided to leave everything with our old tpstreet@bellsouth.net email account and use the tomstreet1951@gamil.com to send out receipts.
After lunch on Thursday Mom let me go to the garden and help weed. I was extremely excited for I NEEDED to get outside and work. We plan to plant green beans tomorrow, but the area needed to be weeded. To my dismay my arm only lasted an hour—but to my delight I did get to weed. I came back up to the house and spent the rest of the afternoon vacuum sealing the spaghetti squash I had cooked on Monday and getting it in the freezer. Steve and Mom continued weeding and got 80% of the area done. Papa was busy mowing down weeds in the fields where yucky weeds had taken over—but one of the bolts broke and he had to spend the rest of his afternoon putting in a new bolt. Let me rephrase that. To replace a bolt is really quick and easy if you can find the bolt. I walked outside to find Papa opening drawer after drawer looking for a bolt. He then told me that the new bolts “were” in the plastic cabinet in the corner of the garage “right there”—but to his grand dismay that cabinet was no longer in the garage because back in the spring Mom, Steve and I had cleaned out the garage in order to make room for one ton totes of chicken feed and that plastic cabinet left the property after it was emptied out. All its contents are now in piles on the floor in the “new” tool room shed where nothing has been organized since the day we unloaded everything in there. Papa did finally find “a” bolt, but not “the” bolt.
Friday morning we did our chores and when the milking was done I bottled the kefir, the whey and packaged the quark then we headed over to watch someone butcher a cow. I have to admit that gutting chickens is my favorite part of processing, and once when we did a sheep I found it fascinating to see all the organs and how they fit so tightly inside. Truly God has fearfully and wonderfully made all things. We got to watch the skinning of the cow and then the gutting and I found that the lungs of a cow are not tucked into the rib cage like they are in a chicken, they actually hang freely in front of the ribs. I know that it isn’t for everyone—but there used to be a day when if you wanted to eat you had better be able to do it all yourself.
Saturday found Wally back on the farm tagging along with Steve doing his morning chores of feeding the bulls, moving the heifers, feeding, watering and moving the hoop houses that contain the broiler chickens. Then there was the milk to bottle and orders to pack—so he got a good taste of a Saturday morning on the farm. Everyone headed home around 1:00 and Papa headed to Gainesville to make deliveries. Mom did some mowing around the courtyard, greenhouse and milk house and I worked on the computer some and then in the kitchen. I had the dishes done by the time Mom had finished mowing and then we both worked in the kitchen making orange jello, chocolate freezer candy (a mixture of cream, butter, sunflower butter, honey, cayenne pepper, salt and chopped walnuts—dropped by spoonful’s on a parchment lined cookie sheet and placed in the freezer), and Mom boiled some milk and maple sugar and then froze it so that we could make some strawberry gelato. She made the gelato today and it was SO very delicious.
Well that was my weak—and this coming week looks like it will be very interesting. I do know that I will be spending much time in the greenhouse putting little seeds into dirt in seed trays.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare