A Productive Day, Told in Excruciating Detail

What a productive day I had! Phil, too, in Colorado kept busy. He said that he mowed our Carlock house’s lawn, and that it was perfect pasture, with a good mix of plants (plantain, dandelion, field peas, rye, along with regular grass). Some of the grass stalks were 9” long! And for dinner he headed to Bill Burger’s house, where he watched the USC game. Incredibly, their starting quarterback is a true freshman: 18 years old, starting for the number one ranked school. Truly incredible.

But lawns and football are long miles away. While I believe that eventually we will have a pasture, for the moment we have small oat sprouts and red clover popping up all over. My hope is that it will be sufficient to prevent the slopes from eroding more. And instead of football, we have the remains of the 10 cubic yards of dirt to entertain us. But more on that in a bit.

After my few chores (check on all the animals for food and water; feed the boys breakfast), I drove into the post office to check for packages. I have several Amazon orders coming (edible plants for the region! Herbs! How to construct buildings!) and at some point my several pounds of garlic and onions, as well as golden seal roots, will arrive, and then I will need to make raised beds. It seemed prudent to check, and I had things to mail to my mother, so I went into Esmont.

Sandra at the window was so solicitous. I set down my pile of books and catalogs and said, “I need to mail this.” So she helped me find the right box, helped me package all those items, and then taped the box with a LOT of tape. The best part was, it all fit in a prepaid mailer, which was good because based on weight, it was over $22, but because it fit in a small mailer, it was $10.50. Nice!

Only one of my books had arrived, unfortunately, and no sign yet of my garlic or onions. So we returned home. I think the forty minute drive was worth it, but it would have felt more worth it had I had more than one box waiting.

Back at home, I called Butch to see if he would be willing to spread the minerals. With seven totes at about 3000 pounds per tote, I am really hoping he will deal with it this time. Otherwise, I’m not sure how Phil will manage; he’ll probably need to borrow Butch’s tractor, but that is a lot of weight for a borrowed piece of equipment, and an $80,000 tractor is not something to borrow lightly. Butch said he would come by Monday morning and assess the situation. What an incredibly gracious neighbor he is.

We were supposed to move the goats today (they’ve been in that pen since Wednesday), but because Bubby is a more enthusiastic forager, I didn’t think they were quite done with that paddock. I hopped in and sawed down a few of the more tippy saplings to give my girls a few extra preferred leaves. They were grateful. Goats have the same four-part stomach that cows do. Thus, they take great bites of hard-to-digest plants, moisten with just enough saliva to swallow, and eat such bites until both the top two stomachs are full. They wander around eating, taking, I believe, about 60% of their food from browse, and 40% from hay (or grasses if we had grasses).

Then they rest, which is a beautiful thing indeed. We have three resting goats, at times, their jaws working steadily. While they rest, goats cough up balls of roughage, called cud, and chew it thoroughly. Then it goes into the third stomach, and finally into the fourth, which is similar to human stomachs (I’ve heard), from which the nutrients exit into the bloodstream.

From what I’ve heard, humans have been able to survive on grasses in time of famine (and wheatgrass is a health food, after it’s juiced), but our stomachs are not designed to process grass. If you find yourself on the brink of starvation, just chew any grass you must eat really well.

(Phil is currently reading the informative and humorous book All Flesh Is Grass. And if you think about it, it’s literally true! The author of that book, Gene Logsdon, is fun to read, should you want specific ideas on small-scale farming. He has many books, one of which was on how to grow grains on a small scale. So, should you wish to have a pancake garden (really just a patch of wheat), feel free to plant one in your yard. He did, and he can tell you how to, too. September 26 and 27 are especially ideal days to get your wheat or spelt in the ground, should you be so inclined. They’ll be ready for harvest next summer.)

After lunch, I had the boys all get on their bunks and attempted to read school books to them. First I read them the story of Jacob breeding his sheep and goats in front of the stripped saplings, and I liked how God multiplied Laban’s flocks exceedingly while Joseph was there. God can do it for us, too, in his time. Overall, though, I think that unless Jonadab falls asleep, it is quite challenging to do fun school with four antsy boys, so we didn’t last too long. Enough to read about the Stoics, though, and agree that none of us are terribly Stoic about pain. We all say “ow!” when hurt.

Some days ago, I wrote about my bad case of “poison ivy.” Phil finally noticed that one patch looked like it was encircled by a ring. “That looks like ringworm,” he commented. I knew nothing about ringworm, which sounds incredibly gross. It’s not a parasite (that’s roundworm), but a fungus, which, if it gets in your toes is known as athlete’s foot, and if it gets in your undies is known as jock’s itch. Lo and behold, the symptoms of ringworm sound virtually identical to poison ivy: watery blisters, itching and burning. Clotrimazol cleared up the patches in a day, so I think the humidity and the stress of moving caused an outbreak. No wonder the poison ivy remedies weren’t working! (I think I did have a bit of poison ivy initially, but as the itchy watery blisters spread, I couldn’t distinguish between ringworm and poison ivy.)

Because I did not end up having systemic poison ivy (which would have required finding a doctor to administer steroids, so I’m quite thankful), I got to engage in one of the satisfying tasks around the farm: pulling poison ivy vines. They are satisfying to pull because I find a little sprout, maybe three inches high, and pull it up with gloves hands. Usually, it is connected to a vine, which has rootlets coming off of it about every two inches. As I pull with steady pressure, those rootlets detach from the ground with a very small “pop-pop-pop-pop” feel. It’s not a sound, but pulling poison ivy roots is like no other root. I am pleased to say that I can recognize not only the leaves now, but also the root, both visually and by feel.

I could probably have pulled poison ivy the rest of the afternoon, but finally decided that, whenever we get pigs, one of their first jobs could be to dig up and consume those poison ivy vines. They can put their snouts to good use.

What pigs cannot do, and I can, is make lasagna beds for fall planting. So I spent several hours building a few more beds. I had put it off because I was disappointed in the seeds I had already planted. After the two or three days of good rain earlier this week, the only moisture that’s come has been the dew. Now, dew is better than nothing, but I have no running water for irrigation, and I feared that all the seeds so carefully and lovingly planted had died. I complained to Phil and he laughed and told me to water the plants. After all, I have a fine Haws watering can, and we have probably 100 gallons in various storage tanks, including about 30 gallons in a tub up near the garden. As I watered, I noticed that I do have sprouts coming in the peas, and probably in other beds, too, but since they are covered with hay mulch, I’m not certain.

Thankfully, I continue to get packages, and packages have boxes I can use for the base of the garden. I was not anticipating that boxes would be the limiting factor of my garden, but they are!

All the hours I was transporting hay and peat moss, compost and bonemeal, the boys were playing in the remains of the compost heap. Jonadab ended up nakey (I’m not sure how, but suspect one or more of his brothers had something to do with that), and merrily crawled on that compost heap all afternoon. His cousin Natalia is known for avoiding naps all day when a party (or any gathering) is going on, but this is the first day I’ve known him to skip naps. A short doze on the way back from the post office was the only rest he had until we drove to the Bessettes at 7pm. He fell asleep in the car so soundly that even the dog’s bark right behind him made him merely frown a bit in his sleep. That was one tired baby!

When my beds were made, I planted many small groups of seeds. I did two varieties of my absolute favorite vegetable, kale (oops—I think I’m two weeks late! We’ll see if it grows); also three varieties of what the boys think is their favorite vegetable, radishes (one type matures in 24 days; one type is a fall type and takes 60 days; one type is the Asian daikon radish, which grows into a large tuber, I think with a texture like the Mexican jicama. I think).

I also planted three types of lettuce seeds, courtesy of a seed swap that Gramps went to. (Gramps also sent some yummy sounding watermelon seeds, among others, but they will have to wait until next year.) I think it’s fun to have some seeds that didn’t come from a seed supply house, but just from someone’s backyard. (FYI: There’s an entire organization dedicated to saving such seeds, called Seed Saver’s Exchange. If you garden and want to get seeds from other gardeners, you can join and get some of their 10,000 varieties. Or, if you just want heritage seeds, you can order a catalog and order from them directly. What I got from Gramps is along the same lines.)

I also planted spinach, which does not excite me, and rainbow chard, which does. Rainbow chard is the incredible fluorescent pink, orange, and yellow vegetable that you may have seen in the health food store. I would not have believed that anything in nature was that color, but rainbow chard is.

By this time, it was about 7pm, and we were all filthy and exhausted. You may have heard about the jeans that were so dirty that, when their owner stepped out of them, they continued to stand up on their own? That actually happened to me today! Well, not ACTUALLY, but I think I am just shy of that occurring. The Bessettes went away overnight, so we bathed. The water after the boys were done was indescribably dirty, and I didn’t take a picture because a picture would not do justice to the hot chocolate-colored water.

They started to watch Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, but I made them quit before the end, and put them to bed at the Bessettes. I was too tired to drive home.

I can tell that Phil is out of town—this was one long post!