A Lot Happens in Two Weeks

I only went away for a week, which isn't technically long enough to even miss home, but when my airport shuttle turned into the driveway, I was delighted to be back. It's a new thing for me, wanting to be nowhere as much as I want to be home. I wonder how I'm going to deal with a whole month away... but the Arctic trip is coming up quickly. A lot changes in a month around here, and I'm going to miss so much of it!

This time of year, a lot can change in a day. When I left, the baby lettuce mix and spinaches were just coming in to harvest, and the broccoli and kale under the row covers were tiny. The lettuce mix and spinach have been going to market the past two weeks, the leaf lettuce is a week or two from being ready (right now, it's "adolescent" lettuce - meaning it would taste great, but the heads are so small that it would be hard to charge enough to actually turn a profit on them), and the broccoli and kales are thriving.

Lots of things that have been seeded (winter squash, beets, radishes, lettuces, peas, zucchini, chard, beans, spinach, onions, parsnips...) are coming up, but to the untrained eye, it doesn't look like much. Lorenz said, "oh, it's looking good", my response was, "what, the dirt?" - so he pointed out some of the plants. The transplants are easier to see - because things like green onions, basil, broccoli, collards, head lettuces, chicory and kale already look like something when they come out of the greenhouse.

Seeding looks like it's a lot of work - when I wandered up to the field this afternoon, Lorenz was taking what seemed like a very long walk pushing a very small cart. The very small cart is the seeder - you change the white plastic plate depending on what you are seeding, and fold out the guide at the side (which is adjustable to various row widths) and push... It's a very big field for such a small seeder. I did ask about tractor seeding, but Lorenz muttered something about $38,000 worth of implements. Oh.

The fields, though, are not the most exciting place to be. A few months ago, Ruth said to me, "I bet the baby's going to be born June 4th". The baby in question was Fay's foal, and Ruth proved to be exactly right in her prediction. It had something to do with the full moon on June 4th, apparently. Starting the end of May, Ruth started sleeping in the house and getting up several times a night to check on her mare. When she got up at 2 a.m. on Thursday night, the new foal had arrived. Hobo and Nemo got very agitated when Ruth moved Fay and the baby to another paddock, and their noise woke me up - in my pajamas, I admired the not-yet-an-hour-old foal.

It's pretty much magic, watching a newborn foal. Within minutes, the mare has it licked dry and it's on its feet. It wobbles around, not straying more than three feet from its mother, and nuzzling her in all sorts of places looking for her udder and milk. Fay is very protective - even Boris was afraid to enter the paddock in the morning, Lorenz said he was picking up on the mare's signal to stay away. When she comes to the rails, she likes to keep her own body between you and the foal. Only Ruth is allowed to touch the foal, and Fay even lets her lead her out of the paddock and trusts that the foal will follow. As of today, the mother and baby are back in with Hobo, Nemo and Odin - apparently, the "boys" weren't eating any more, they were so disturbed at being separated from Fay and the baby.

Of course, now that there's this unbelievably cute foal to fuss over, the goose has gotten the boot! Ok, not really - but Romeo was getting bigger and more and more uppity. He would no longer stay in his box - so at night, while Ruth was sleeping here, there would be this box with a lid on it that cheeped and quacked away. His cute "me me me me me" beeps were gradually getting replaced with more assertive "quack quack quack", and his poop production started reaching epic proportions. Not only that, but he's also discovered the territory-marking hiss: when Ruth plunked him into the chicken coop with the young roosters, Romeo bossed them all around. At this stage, it's more cute than threatening - I can still reach out and pinch his beak shut when he does that, but soon he'll be annoying. Ruth doesn't think it's good for him to get that used to being with people as he gets older, so he's now moved on to her parents' place to live with another goose.

The roosters have been moved to an outside chicken coop beside the greenhouse (when Lorenz saw the picture I took from above, out of the heritage building, he commented that it looked like some hillbilly homestead - the result of the various weird fortifications that were added when the pigs lived there last year). The young laying hens are still in the barn coop, and the older laying hens are having fun scatching away in the yard. Lorenz doesn't let them out until mid-afternoon, because otherwise they'd hide their eggs all over the place. Much better to get them out of the laying boxes - if eggs show up anywhere else, they get discarded because you have no way of knowing how fresh they are. Lately, the hens have been venturing further and further from the barn - this afternoon, I discovered them hanging out on the concrete pad outside my apartment.

Actually, I've renamed the concrete pad the "Greenfields Cafe" in honour of what most often occurs there. It started with my one beautiful Adirondack chair in Federal yellow (it subsequently got siblings in Ford blue and Case red, but they are hanging out in the garden). Kim came over for coffee after she finished barn chores one morning, and wanted to be guaranteed a prime spot in the cafe. I informed her that reserved seating could only be had through purchase, so she forked over the cash for another chair - and requested that it be painted John Deere green (I'd say it was in honour of Lorenz's tractor obsession, but I think a more likely scenario is that it's a way to taunt him!). As soon as the chair was painted, she sat in it (Lorenz's response? "Well, I'll just get up earlier and sit in it myself!"). The cafe has been busy ever since, and Lorenz has made a point of parking himself in the green chair. He even brought down his matching coffee cup this morning!

Not that Lorenz has much time for coffee drinking, or anything else, these days. When he's not on the tractor (and, as always, you get a Lorenz on the tractor photo), he's in the greenhouse, or bunching asparagus (that's what I watched him do close to midnight last night) or working away in the office. His latest project? Make dozens upon dozens of gaskets for the irrigation pipes fit. They're a bit too big, and he hasn't been able to get the right size in - so he's hand-trimming them. Malcolm watched him do that for a while before turning into a ham - that's him doing the "I'm a farmer" impression. HP has beed doing all sorts of jobs, including shlepping big rocks for my garden, cutting acres of grass, and helping in the fields. The apprentices have been kept busy transplanting, weeding, finishing the farmstand, taking care of the greenhouse and the chickens, and baking. Oh, wait, the baking isn't part of their job - but Sean dropped by to find some flour the other day, and when he returned my flour tin, he also gave me some rhubarb cake that he'd made. Yum! A talented bunch, these apprentices.

Wow. That's a lot of talking just to get sort of up to date on this farm. And to think, I haven't even started talking about the garden that has become my obsession! But if I were to start there, my server would probably groan and grind to a halt, so I'd better save that for another day.

Posted by Johanna at June 5, 2004 04:19 PM