October 31, 2004
Weekend with Boris
Yesterday, H.P. called. Boris was lounging on my floor, and the first thing I did was hold the phone up to the dog’s ear so he could hear H.P.’s voice. Shocking behaviour for an avowed non-dog-person such as me. But then, the volume of pictures I take of Boris is equally shocking, not to mention the fact that I let him hang out in my apartment, smelly fur and all. 
But what would you do? The weather outside was frightful, and Boris was cowering in the red barn, reluctant to go out into torrential rain and wind. And it’s not like Lorenz or the kids were home. When they did come home this afternoon, Boris felt the need to sulk (in his case, press into me and ignore Lorenz) for a few moments: he was fully aware that, the last two mornings, I was the one who had fed him. He got over it and licked Lorenz’s face quickly enough, but for a minute, he showed how he felt about being ignored for two whole days.
But back to H.P. calling… he made some comment on the red barn troll website not being updated in weeks, was there nothing going on? I came out with my lame excuse which involved sleeping and gardening and procrastinating but mostly working and working some more. And then I babbled on about all that has been going on here of late, and realized, wow, there’s a lot that’s new since the last troll entry and if I don’t write one soon, I’ll get truly overwhelmed by it. So, here’s the scoop:
The triplets are now just one, Sean left on Friday. He’s moved back to Toronto. Justin is sticking around for a while longer, from what I hear. Tara has also decided to move on, she’s leaving Greenfields at the end of the year. Lorenz has hired another Tarrah (good thing she spells her name differently) to cover for the time being. Lorenz himself is going to Germany for most of November, and Boris suspects that something like this is happening and is thus making sure he sucks up to me since Lorenz is unlikely to get him his food if he’s in Germany…
Sean has cured his last bunch of tobacco in the manure pile (in a special box he built for this purpose). He delivered a hand-rolled cigarette to Lorenz, though Malcolm was the one who tried to smoke it. Fortunately, he hasn’t yet clued in that you need to pull air through the cigarette to keep it lit, so it was an ineffective experiment in smoking.
The chickens are laying eggs like it’s their last chance (and in the case of the older laying hens, this is not a bad strategy: their replacements have become productive, so if the old girls weren’t producing, it would only take one van ride for Lorenz to announce that he has soup hens for sale). The old and young hens aren’t allowed to run around the farmyard on the same days – the old hens have had more months to pick up all sorts of parasites which the young ones shouldn’t have yet. Most days, seniority wins the freedom battle, but on days when Lorenz wants the farm to look good, he lets out the young ‘uns, who look much prettier these days. The day the Waldorf school came to visit Emma the donkey (she was her ornery self and wandered away) and the pumpkin patch, the young hens were let free. One of them failed to find her way back to the coop as it got dark, and concluded that my apartment must be home. I had a flying fowl attack my windows! Lorenz flat-out refused to become chicken-catcher (he said something along the lines of long day, bathtub – but that didn’t solve my noisy poultry invader from trying to attack my windows and door!), so I was on my own. I trapped her under a bushel basket, and Tara ended up helping me slide cardboard under the basket and transferring the angry young hen back to the coop.
Me, I’ve spent a lot of my spare (ha!) time in my garden, taking down some junky trees, digging in compost, and removing all the invasive weeds by digging out their roots. I took out the fireplace H.P. built, since we barely ever used it and without it I’ll have room for a picnic table next year. 
I also dug in about 200 flower bulbs – crocus, daffodil, tulip, alium, lily, grape hyacinth, iris, anemone (though the last two are not bulbs but rhizomes). I’ve re-done my brick path to improve drainage, moved the strawberries, dug up the gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers for the winter, and established a whole new flower bed. Even Lorenz has been spending some time digging in bulbs, though only around the house (he briefly toyed with the idea of tulips for cut flowers at the commercial scale, but the bulbs are just too expensive).
Field operations have been going strong all month. The crew is still harvesting like mad (though with the longer nights, they get started later and thus I have few chances to take pictures of them working). There has been much harvesting of root crops: parsnips, carrots, beets and sunchokes have all figured strongly this month. One day a couple of weeks ago, I saw Justin and Sean bring down a tractor-bucket full of buckets full of parsnips. Sean decided to rudely moon me, but cosmic revenge was swift:
Justin accidentally tilted the bucked a slight bit downward and, when he drove over a bump, all of the parsnips spilled out and the triplets had to spend an extra ten minutes picking them all up again. There have also been plenty of greens, such as late spinach, kale, broccoli and brussel sprouts to take to market. The deer population is higher than it’s ever been – most of this year’s raddichio and much of the lettuce became deer food – and the farm team has put row covers on some of the late greens in an effort to keep it ungulate free.
The markets at Guelph and at the farm have been moved indoors (after the red barn got some major tidying up), and the Friday market is over for the season. Fall took its time arriving (nobody complained): 
at the beginning of the month, Malcolm was still in shorts at all times and I spent afternoons lounging in a still blooming garden. By the 15th, the leaves were out in full colour glory. As of today, all the leaves have turned and been ripped off the trees. 
It’s been raining a whole lot, and the days are short so we’ve been 
spending more time indoors. I believe Lorenz is fully caught up on his Coronation Street watching. And now I’m sort of caught up on the barn trolling…
Oh yeah, we have a recipe site now! Go check it out! Soon, we’ll have a whole new web page, but that means that Lorenz has to scale back on the Coronation Street watching and spend an evening proofing text… (and thus, Johanna gets a none-too-subtle reminder in…)
