Naughty Bianca, Nifty Berkshires

Naughty Bianca would not stand to be milked, and she's figured out how to step over the back-leg board. Not a great start to the day, to have washed her udder soothingly in warm water, then have to run to the trailer and wake Phil up to help me cobble her.

Instead of cobbling, he put a halter on and put her face right to the fence, then put the board up. She had almost no wiggle room (though she still managed to inch her way backward, backward, backward). Bethany, on the other side of the fence, was poking her with her horns, and one of the yearlings came to see her from the front. That Bianca was a popular cow. And all that activity made her give only 5 pounds of milk, half what she gave yesterday.

And I got a tale whip in the eye, which stung quite badly and made me cry (I had poked that same eye a week ago very badly, so that's my excuse, for all you tough farmer-cowboys out there who take tale whips in the eye without flinching).

My hope is that Bianca is in heat, and that's the reason for the excessive attention and poor milk production. Otherwise. she maybe just had her let down, and stopped right in the middle of milking, and I missed it while I went to get Phil.

Phil continues to clear the fence line. Butch worked all day Sunday and cleared all the way to the creek. Phil is taking out trees that have grown up along the fence line for the last forty years, and then Butch will move them out of the way with his big equipment.

Sadly, Phil was trying to cut one down so it would fall away from its natural bent, and he got the chainsaw entirely stuck. A drive to Charlottesville for a new blade and a new bar, and he managed to fell the tree without killing himself. (This wasn't entirely a done deal: after he cut a second hinge point, higher on the tree, the tree still refused to fall. He cut part of the hinge, but the tree STILL didn't fall. He couldn't cut all the hinge, as the tree could behave in unpredictable, perhaps lethal ways, so he used the truck and some slings to pull it down, more or less where it should fall. Phew!)

He has between 10 and 50 more trees to down, depending on how clean he wants to make the fence line. And hundreds of feet of barbed wire to clean up. It's a big task.

Our really big news, though, is that, since we have found it impossible to find Berkshire piglets for sale, we went and met with Charlottesville's main Berkshire breeder. He's getting out of the business, and selling his farm.

We really liked it.

So our question now is: do we stay, or do we move? Twenty minutes away isn't too far ... but it is far. Far from our beautiful Esmont community, from Butch, the Bessettes, and all the Bushes; 20 minutes farther from church and community group. Twenty minutes deeper into the country—and that makes it COUNTRY, with dead cars, bathrobe-clad women, and Confederate flags.

On the other hand, to have a business with all the infrastructure in place, a doublewide trailer to live in, a mentor on-site to help ... that's appealing, too. (Can you imagine? ALL the infrastructure! All the expensive pieces we've been trying to locate for a year, that we have scratched our heads about how or when to buy.)

We wouldn't sell our little orchard, and might even choose to finish pigs in our woods. Maybe continue to rotate cows on the pasture. Plan to market fruit when the time comes.

But when would we find the time to work here on this, our Spring Forth Farm? With a large market garden, good-sized pig operation, and direct marketing to chefs and farmers markets, there wouldn't be much extra time to come and clear our lower pasture; not much time to prune the trees; not much time to watch the leaves change in our view.

And all I've read says that market gardening is really, really time-consuming. Is that in line with our goals of "the good life"?

On the other hand, is bleeding money each month, and having Phil fly back to Colorado for a week at a time periodically our idea of the good life?

We both feel that either option is a good option. So far, no real clarity one way or the other.

Please pray for us. The boys lately have been wishing for a house, for their books to get out of storage. I have been remembering the dishwasher and the washing machine (as Joe's potty training continues very slowly) with great nostalgia lately.

Overall, though, it's invigorating to consider the possibility, and gives me great excitement, whether we enthusiastically take on this new venture, or continue with what we're doing with renewed vigor and vim.