Towing and Sprinkling

This felt like a long day. Jonadab fell asleep after 1am, and we were all up by 7:30. Phil went out and started drilling holes. In an hour or two, he had finished a total of 37, or all that he plans to do on the first row. (Eventually we’ll have 40 there, adding the one that Phil dug by hand, plus two on the ends where we have T-post markers now.

At 10am, Phil left to pick up the fencing. He first stopped at Rental City to rent a flatbed trailer. He knew it might be dicey, since the hitch we have is 2 ½”, while their equipment is 2”. While there, the guys in the machine shop adjusted our hitch (gratis!), so now we have a standard-sized hitch. That’s good!

But it took a while. Phil got back with about one-third of the fencing at 3:30. He used the skid steer to unload the heavy fencing (putting it to another use I hadn’t anticipated). He figured he had two loads to go. He took the boys with him on the second trip, and called me from Charlottesville at 6:30, saying they had almost loaded everything, and he hoped it wasn’t too heavy.

Over the next two hours, there were several specific moments where I felt the need to pray for my boys’ protection. The trip usually takes no more than an hour. After he got home, Phil confessed that there was one moment that he figured he had just killed all five of them. In order to avoid town traffic, he took an alternate route. On I-64, he had pushed the truck to the swift speed of 45 mph (which is pretty good for a dually towing seven tons). Suddenly he started fishtailing so badly he expected the truck to roll at any moment; he pulled onto the shoulder and came to basically a complete stop before he regained control.

It was the most scared he had ever been while driving.

Back at home, he looked online to figure out why that had happened, and how to prevent it. Based on a diagram, it seems that the trailer was loaded too heavily in the back, and the hitch had too much pressure, and tried to raise the back of truck. Or something like that. He went no faster than about 37 mph the rest of the way home, and arrived safely. Once again, God protected us.

My farm accomplishment was to stir biodynamic preparations and fling them on the ground. Biodynamic farms seek to use the cosmic forces (i.e. that of the moon, the planets, and the stars) in order to increase the health of the soil and the crop. This sounds very “New Agey” but I think it makes sense. The moon exerts an unmistakable force on the tides; labor and delivery nurses joke about how when the moon is full, they can hear the bags of water popping all over the city, so the moon exerts a force even on a much smaller body of water. I would suspect that other celestial bodies also exert forces—or, at least, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

And they use specific preparations or “preps” to improve the soil.

Most of these preps are embarrassing to even admit to using. My personal nomination for the most outlandish is BD [for biodynamic] 505: “In America 505 is usually made from the finely ground outer bark of the white oak tree (Quercus alba), which is packed in the cranial cavity of a domestic farm animal’s skull and buried for the autumn and winter in a spot where water trickles constantly.” (I told you it’s embarrassing!)

One of my favorite biodynamic thoughts came from the first book I read on the subject, A Biodynamic Farm, by Hugh Lovel. Overall, the book is disjointed, but quite interesting, nonetheless. Lovel says that Newton figured out that the apple falls due to gravity. But he didn’t acknowledge how the apple got into the tree to begin with—a force Lovel calls “levity.” (Great, huh?)

To insert a little levity into this email, I made pizza for dinner in the little convection oven. I used cheap shredded mozzarella from Costco. And Joe vomited up (levity there) the same horrid smelling, foul liquid that was a constant part of his first few weeks alive, before I cut out dairy. He hasn’t done that in a year, but I guess that’s a lesson to me: no more cheap cheese.

Hurry up, goats! Almost time to kid! I’m ready for milk of my own.