It feels like years since I last posted. This post is a brainstorm of topics I ought to/could write about. I do so have a fondness for lists.
milking again
realizing it’s summer – I don't need three blankets and two pairs of long underwear and a sweatshirt to go to sleep
getting obsessed with draft animal power - who needs tractors, anyway?
cooking a lot – making ice cream, making kimchee; we have a joke that the hardest questions to answer at farmers' market are when people say "so, you just boil this up like spinach, right?" to which we would like to reply, why would you boil spinach? Any and all vegetables is to fry them with garlic and a little olive oil.
harvesting – 4xperweek --> routine: walks back and forth between field and wash station; the water isn’t bitter cold like it was in the fall; picking the wilted yellow cotyledons off the radishes, packing vegetables into baskets, summer squash just coming in
tomatoes plants have such a distinctive smell; harvesting kale feels like an old friend since I did it so much in the fall
making tons of cheese from our raw milk; it's sour and has a consistency similar to cottage cheese, and it's really yummy, in part due to all the cream in it
we've had too much rain and too many weeds; it's best to kill the weeds when they're just germinating, because baby plants have a much more tenuous hold on life than more mature ones
a smattering of our crops that we've been able to harvest: radishes; kale; arugula, lettuce, spinach, collards, broccoli, kohlrabi, komatsuna, pac choi, bok choi, napa, shuko, wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress, rainbow chard, dill, cilantro, summer squash, broccoli
smattering of the annual and perennial weeds – jewel weed, Canada thistle, burdock, ragweed, lamb’s quarters, fake arugula, campion, hemp nettle, golden rod, grasses, dock, dandelions, plantain, oxalis, clover, galanzoga, morning glory
in performing some tasks I find my motions echoing those of A&E doing that same task which I've watched them do countless times – like unloading the truck, waiting for the milk to filter, reaching in and grabbing bunches of greens from harvest boxes
The baby is a perfect joy and a good friend. We have many and extensive conversations now. I don't think she'll remember me, though.
Chickens are dusty little feathered velociraptors.
Selling meat at market – new thing! I'm doing markets by myself so I have to know something about the meat I'm selling; I’m learning from which parts of the animal the different cuts come from, and how they functionally differ. Which is: bone, or no bone. Steak or roast.
Strawberries. Omg. People raving about delicious food they've eaten is only interesting for so long, but fresh, good strawberries are tiny ruby bursts of delicate sweet. Too bad the slugs think so too.
Farmers tan like whoa.
Scything – twisting, swinging, satisfying
Being really intrigued by Essex farm – a sliding price scale for their CSA, they offer unlimited supply of vegetables, meat, maple syrup, they're year-round, the wife who had never farmed and is now writing a book rather than working the farm, their isolation from the internet;
I like diversity in a farming operation, and I've been thinking about models that would incorporate diversity and work – perhaps having a couple diff farms that share the sectors
Extroverted farmers? Efficiency?
Wheat. Golden. So little maintenance. None of this weeding or worrying about successions or anything. Now we just have to harvest it.
Peas. Tried to do a living trellis of oats or sunflowers – failed. They didn’t climb the oats and the sunflowers just weren’t there, so they sprawled all over the paths. Sugar snap peas; snow peas; shell peas. I can usually keep them straight, but it's confusing.
Small Farmers’ Journal – periodical dedicated to small-scale farmers, with a strong focus on people who work with horses. I read a really good article about debt, the scale of farming (big w/ debt vs small w/o) and re-thinking standards of living.
Endless cooking. Endless dishes. Particularly the milk pots.
Living a wanderer’s life; wanting to settle down like anything but not really being ready to.
I really like rotational grazing. It's a really cool concept: have a group of animals graze an area down really hard, then move them on to the next and then the next until when they're ready to come back to the first area it's all grown back. Good for the plants, the soil, the animals. Uses grass = free. The fencing and everything else, not so free, but still.
Clover needs light to germinate, so doesn't show up in dense grasses. There are different species of clover. I sort of know the differences between them. It's yummy and fixes nitrogen. And it's pretty.
66 varieties of tomatoes planted omg. Black, yellow, orange, bi-color, cherry, saladette, big ol' slicers. I can't wait.
I’m suddenly really into permaculture, in part because weeding annual plants feels like such a losing battle. I guess our perennials badly need to be weeded too, but everything is more established there and works better.
Getting knocked in the teeth by the Wort (our Brown Swiss steer. He's a jerk.)
Giving skritches to Little Guy (our little motherless red calf) because I love him, but feeling conflicted every time because I know the point is to get him to one day get on a trailer peacefully. Um. Like when that man asked if we’d sell him three lambs, and I was suddenly like – oh! Not our lambs! Don’t kill them!
Getting the sheep skins back from the tanners. They’re beautiful. I salted them when they were still wet and fleshy. Now they’re lovely. Hello, matters of life and death.
Bug bites. I don't wake up in the middle of the night scratching *too* often.
Playing the piano. My soul is woven in music.
Learning my own management style. Very important.
A friendly bull is a dead bull.
A’s attitude towards our animals – our species made an agreement of mutual care and support with their species long ago and we need to uphold our end of it; that livestock are different from pets and wild animals and oughtn't be treated as either
Being really inexperienced at driving the truck. I hate trucks. Except that they carry heavy things for long distances, which is actually pretty sweet.
Understanding why farmers don't like paperwork; I don't even want to answer emails because I'm so tired at the end of the day.
Speaking of which. Good night world.
