Phil and I spent Friday working diligently on our for-pay jobs. We both dislike wind, and the wind blew. We were happy to be inside.
In the evening, Joe found a rubber band gun and "shot" Jadon. He held it up to his eye, closed an eye (the wrong eye, but that's okay), and made little "pshoo pshoo" noises.
Jadon dramatically fell over, much to Joe's delight.
Today, Phil did not have a fun day. After he fed the children breakfast (making them eat what he served, despite protests by two young men who shall remain nameless but whose names begin with vowels), he drove up to Charlottesville to pick up our bulk food order. Sadly, he and the pick-up lady both didn't have proper contact info. After waiting in the truck with five children for a half hour, he was just about to pull away when she showed up. Mission accomplished.
After racing back to the farm, he plopped the five children on the perimeter of the trampoline and fed them a hurried lunch. (Had he let them enter the house, that would have been ten shoes to put on, as well as, perhaps, ten socks. Brilliant strategy to feed them outside.) Then he drove to the Bessettes, and off to Vintage Virginia where he got to learn about grafting.
The children enjoyed their afternoon at the Bessettes. Phil had a disconcerting ride back home, as the truck made horrible sounds that he couldn't fix. He bathed the children and brought them home at 8pm.
A minute later, I walked in. I had left the house before 5:30am to drive to southern Virginia for a biodynamic gardening workshop. Farmer Jeff Poppens presented helpful information from about 9:15 until 4pm, with about an hour break total. I took pages of notes and had the time of my life.
And I found out what a hoe does! I know people use them, but in my fledgling gardens, I haven't been able to figure out the point. With some trepidation, I asked; a merry chuckle rose from the crowd. Until Jeff said that the primary reason to use a hoe is to stop evaporation. A collective gasp from the crowd.
Apparently, after a rain, the surface dries out. Due to capillary wicking, the water under the surface will run to the surface to keep it wet, where it will continue to evaporate. If a gardener mulched their soil (covered it with hay or bark or other organic matter), that would prevent this wicking and drying. Or a gardener could run the hoe an inch below the soil and fluff the dry surface, creating a "dust mulch." End of evaporation.
The best surprise, though, was that I got to meet Hugh Lovel, who wrote A Biodynamic Farm, the first book on Biodynamics that I read. In it, he made the brilliant (strikingly obvious) point that Newtonian physics covers the gravity of the falling apple, but completely neglects levity, or how the apple got into the tree to begin with.
There was plenty more in his book that blew my mind. He has since moved to Australia, so I startled and pleased to be able to talk with him a bit during the lunch break.
So I had a fulfilling, interesting, intellectually stimulating day. And some six hours all by myself in the car. Ahh. The 178 miles and over 14 hours was the furthest and longest I've ever been away from Jonadab. Actually, probably Abraham and Isaiah, too. (Jadon got left overnight twice as a baby.)
And Phil ran errands. I definitely came out ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment