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Hi Everyone,
It is happening—but does it really mean that we will not get another frost or freeze? They always say that we get our last cold snap the week of Easter. This year Easter is not until the end of April, which is why I am not too worried about waiting until April 11 to plant the majority of our spring garden. There is a sign in nature though, that I have never seen fail, and that is that the pecan trees do not leaf out until all danger of frosts are past. Everything else can be fooled by the warmer weather, but not the majestic pecan. On our way to church today we saw that just about every pecan tree had leafed out—so could it mean that there will be no more frost for us Floridians. We shall just have to wait and see. The chestnuts on the hill are leafing out—but we lost a few of those trees one year when a freeze hit shortly after they leafed out. I am hoping for the perfect amount of rain, and that it will not freeze or frost anymore, so that the grasses stay green—and get greener and greener, and taller and taller. Spring is surely a beautiful time on the farm.
It looks like that the next two weeks here on the farm are going to be busy—and full of character building. I am a big dreamer, and I am not an either/or person, but it seems that I may have to swallow a few compromises as my dreams face reality. We love to garden, and could spend all day in the garden—and we probably would if we could. I love to plan the garden, scanning through seed catalogues deciding which veggies and flowers to grow. Then I have to design the garden—as in what gets planted where and how. This year I want to utilize four of the large garden beds with yummy vegetables and pretty flowers—but some of those beds still need weeded and tilled under. One section we planted in a cover crop back in the fall. The idea with a cover crop is to keep it mowed, so that it feeds the soil. Then it is best to have it tilled under so that it can decompose a good month before you are ready to plant—or you could put chickens in and let them eat the grass and till it in. Well, while we had choices A, B, and C, by default (too busy to plan) we chose choice D—none of the above. Therefore, a nice size section of one of the garden beds is thick with green rye grass that is about a foot or more tall. The lawn mower cannot mow it down, and the tiller would never be about to till it under—so I think that I just might try one of David the Good’s tricks. It is called chop and drop. With a saw blade on the end of the weed eater, Steve should be able to cut the grass down to the ground. Then all we have to do is make our beds of compost dirt on top of the cut grass. It should be thick enough to suppress all weeds from coming up. Another design element that I want to use in the garden are trellises to grow all the vining plants up—watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumbers, winter squashes, lima beans and noodle beans. Mom and I have two of the trellises up—and it was most exhausting. We have five more trellises to put up. We hope to be able to have Steve help us with this—I guess we shall do the eggs on the rainy day, and work in the garden when the rain stops. My goal is to have the garden all weeded, tilled, the trellises built, and the compost put in its rightful place before we have to plant all the seeds on April 11. Between lack of hands, lack of energy (Mom’s new diet is not “farmer friendly”), rain, and everything else that we have to prepare for, or do on a daily basis—we shall see just what all gets done. J Last week we were able to spend all day Monday and part of Friday in the garden weeding.
Tuesday found us milking the cows, bottling the kefir, and packaging eggs for the rest of the day. The weather outside was so delightful, and the garden was calling us ever so enticingly that it was all we could do to keep our feet inside packaging eggs—but our diligence paid off and we accomplished a lot of the eggs. Since we had to harvest veggies for the Wednesday delivery—we still got to go play in the garden. All day we watched as people flew down our dirt road, and sent clouds of lime rock dust across our pastures. We desperately needed rain, and we were thankful that it was in the forecast—though it was only to be half an inch. Papa said that he hoped that we would get two inches. At 9:00 that night the heavens began to fall, but not very heavy. Then at 3:30 in the morning the heavens let lose. I climbed out of bed and tip toed to the living room to take a peek at my weather station. I wanted to see just how fast the wind was blowing (17 mph), and I wanted to see how fast it registered the rain. When I first arrived it said .13 for the amount of rain. Then right before my eyes it began to climb—.14, .15, .16, and .17. Twenty minutes later when I went to bed we had received a quarter of an inch and it said that it was raining at about one inch per hour. I thought that Papa just might get his two inches, and I went back to bed. When we awoke in the morning we saw that we had received 1.10 inches of rain—what a blessing. Tomorrow is April 1st and it seems that the April showers shall be living up to their name—for rain seems to be in the forecast almost every day.
Thursday the Crane men came to finish up the electric and plumbing on the Poultry Kitchen. They arrived around 8:00 in the morning, and when they left here around 9:30 that night, their job was done and we had lights, electricity, and running water. Now the race to the finish line begins. April 12th is the “grand opening” of the Poultry Kitchen—meaning that is our first chicken processing day of the year. We still have to seal the concrete floor, buy hoses to hang from the ceiling with spray nozzles at the end, and an extension plug pull down to plug in the scalder and the plucker—the electrical sockets are in the ceiling since we have to hose out the building. We would love to have tables and sinks, but we haven’t found the money tree. Our worker, Moises, says that he wants a money tree that only produces Benjamin Franklin’s. J While it would be nice to have all the new equipment in place, we have been processing chickens for the last ten+ years, and what we have been using, will suffice until we can get the new items. This will be our first time to process in a building though—usually we have worked outside exposed to all the elements nature has to offer.
While everyone else was working on the Poultry Kitchen, Mom had to go to town to pick up more parts for the electrical and plumbing and she had to pick up new batch of chicks from the Post Office. I was inside doing laundry and making some more Soothing Salve, Black Drawing Salve, and Lotion Bars. I also had a slight detour with the vacuum cleaner. While mixing all the ingredients for the Black Salve, I knocked over a glass measuring cup and sent it crashing (shattering) to the floor. When glass shatters, it goes everywhere, and the only real way to clean it up is with the vacuum cleaner. While it would have been simple to just vacuum up the kitchen, I seem to have this problem of not knowing where to stop when I get out the vacuum cleaner. You see, the kitchen is connected to the dining room, laundry room, and the living room. Then the living room is connected to the hallway, and down the hallway are a bunch of doors that lead to bedrooms…….and let’s just say that a good portion of the house got vacuumed. Later the kitchen floor even got a section mopped up when I spilt milk on the floor—I was fixing lunch for Papa and I, and he was talking to me as I was filling up my glass of milk. Like a respectful daughter I was looking at him J and that ended with me having to clean up a big milk mess. It was just one of those days—for the very first thing that I did when I entered the kitchen that morning was to spill Mom’s glass of water. I almost didn’t make lotion bars since my success rate of disasters was pretty nigh—and maybe I shouldn’t have, for as I was pouring the hot liquid into the mold I dipped my potholder in the liquid. Maybe I created a new item---lotion infused potholders. Actually, my goal is to figure out how to remove the thin layer of lotion bar from the potholder. As the saying goes—“No one can do it like Tiare!”
Friday I was destined to spend the whole day inside once again for there was kefir to bottle, yogurt to make and kombucha to make. By 2:30 the garden was calling so strongly that I decided to go play in the garden until 4:00 and then come inside and make kombucha. There was one problem though, Mom was wiser than me, and when I told her at 4:15 that I needed to go inside and make kombucha, she wisely said, “Not today,” for she did not want to eat dinner at 9:00 at night. So, maybe I should have ignored the garden, and stayed in the kitchen, but you cannot undo your choices once you have acted upon them.
Saturday morning started bright and early. After getting ready for the day, I started to make two of the beds that I had washed from our last company. We had company coming in the afternoon—and I wanted those beds made. Then it was time to fix breakfast, so that we could milk the cows before our company showed up. We had finished milking by the time our friend arrived, but she got to help Mom bottle the milk while I packed the Gainesville order. Our special guest was our dear friend Alison who has been working on our new website. She has done such a beautiful job. Her photography and design have been great. The website still has a few things to work on, but we ran into a need of having the website up and running. We are planning to host the Second Annual Sheep Seminar on April 27th here at the farm from 1:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon. We needed a way to advertise with the ability to pre-order tickets---and the website was the answer to that. It is still a work in progress—though most of it is done. The garden page is still “under construction” but the calendar is there telling you that we will be planting the garden April 11th and 12th. So we spent our whole afternoon planning, designing and fine tuning. The website should be up and running by the end of the week. After Alison left we had dinner to cook and kombucha—well I decided that the best thing to do was to bottle the kombucha and make it on Monday or Tuesday.
That was last week, and it is time for me to retire for the night so that I can prepare my sleepy head for next week—or is it next month. J
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare