May 04, 2004
Day to Day
I love the look and comfort of wooden Adirondack chairs, and I wanted one. Bo told me he got his at TSC, and since Lorenz and I were passing a TSC the other day and TSC's are like candy stores to farmers, we stopped. I knew that the chairs come in boxes of parts and the rest is up to you, and I was prepared for that - but I was still a bit intimidated. Considering how not mechanically inclined I am, I have great tools (courtesy of my brother over several Christmases), but tools alone do not take care of assembly. Thus, the picture on the right is a source of pride - only twice did I smack my head at my own stupidity and have to undo something I did, and I got the sucker put together in under an hour! Interestingly enough, the kit calls it a "Cape Cod" chair - "Muskoka" chair I could understand since north of the border we like to Canadianize the "Adirondack" label (I so don't care) and the kit is clearly Canadian (it used #8 Robertson screws throughout), but "Cape Cod"? Regardless of the name, though, I love my new chair.
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Today, despite bright sunshine, is a dark day on the biodynamic calendar. That means that it's not a good day to seed, transplant or harvest - and thus J.P. is relieved of the sunchoke digging that has become his constant. H.P., however, has decided that he needs to conduct his own test, and vowed last night that he'd dig a bucket of sunchokes and plant a test strip of dark day sunchokes just to see.
Last week, not being particularly dark either meteorologically or astrologically, Lorenz and J.P. spent loads of time transplanting early brassicas (cabbage, kale, broccoli) and staking row covers over the new transplants to keep them protected from bugs. So far, it hasn't been a particularly dry spring, and while Lorenz has been driving on the fields to till, it's too early to use the transplanter. When you're tilling, you're loosening up the soil you just drove on with the heavy tractor behind you. When you're transplanting, you have no chance to loosen up the soil you just compacted, and the machinery is heavier because you're also carrying a lot of water for the transplants as they go in - so the fields need to be that much drier to do this task without undesirable compaction. Unfortunately for the backs and knees of J.P. and Lorenz, this meant a lot of crouching as they became the human transplanters. Lorenz is really, really fast at it - he opens up the hole for the plug with the transplanting tool, drops the plug in with the other, and closes the hole again in one swift motion.
Less swift is the row cover job. The floating row covers are wide enough to do four rows, and go the full length. They're made of a light mesh which gets caught by the wind easily - so while you're rolling out the row cover, you need to stake it down, and stake it down in such a way that the plants have spare room to row and still have it float while keeping the edges tight enough so the wind doesn't grab them and rip the whole thing off. This is obviously a bit difficult with only two people, so when they did one row while I was poking around the field, I grabbed a bucket of stakes and did one side while J.P. did the other.
Much of Lorenz's view of the world lately has been from the seat of a tractor (but one of the tractors has a new seat, courtesy of the TSC visit. Not to be outdone by my new Adirondack seat, Lorenz walked out with a new tractor seat!). Not only is there a lot of bed preparation for seeding and transplanting, but there are jobs like cultivating among the asparagus bed before the shoots emerge to keep the weeds down. He's also been using the tractor to move things like flats of transplants up to the field. The hill is not dry enough to take the tractor up directly, so right now, getting to the field means driving along the roads. At this time of year, a beater four-wheel drive farm truck would be a handy thing to have, but you can't have everything.
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Also last week, the goose and the bunny went to live a better life at a different farm. Sounds like a gentle way of saying they became dinner, doesn't it? I would suspect as much, except they really did get put in the van and Ruth really did drive them to her parents' farm. So now we're down to chickens, a donkey, many cats, a dog and a barn full of horses at the farm. The bunny and goose needed to go because Lorenz needs the room - the bunny had a whole stall, and the pigs will have to go somewhere when they come. They were outside for a large chunk of last year, but that spot is now reverting to chicken coop for the cockerels.
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I bought some perennials for my garden, but haven't done anything about it yet. I have big ideas, but don't seem to be putting in the time. Putting the chair together was a start, though! And I have a great offer of perennials from an existing garden from a friend, I just have to wait until they've had a bit of a chance to grow before I can dig chunks of them up. I have not lost enthusiasm for my secret garden project, just the opposite. I went to a big nursery to scope out the plants the same day as the TSC escapade, and came home with three hostas, two cardinal flowers (which apparently are lobelias) and one blue lobelia. I want to have Virginia creeper going up the heritage building, lots more hostas, and a row of sunflowers (if they will grow in there, there may not be enough sun). Also, a bunch of native plants, and I'm going to transplant the bulbs I saved from the forced tulips and hyacinths I had in the apartment over the winter in the faint hope that they may survive.
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And so goes my day-to-day life. Work is chaotic, since my office has been taken over by contractors and I am essentially officeless for a few days. Home life is full of the usual stuff, including the farm picture-taking thing. You'd think I'd get bored of poking around the farm and documenting everything Lorenz, Tara, J.P. and H.P. (and soon Sean and Justin) do, but nope, not bored. Not bored at all, actually - there is always something new when things are growing so quickly. No regrets at all about deciding to live in the middle of all this activity.
Oh, and you know what? I'm challenged by grade five math! Malcolm is doing long division in school, and it took me about ten minutes (with Malcolm impatiently explaining it to me) to figure out what he was doing before I could help him. Between the two of us, we figured it out - he knew about the "backing up" part to bring numbers down, but I had him beat on knowing that there's got to be a remainder in the divisions he was doing. It takes a ten-year-old to get me understanding it!