Canning and Seeding

Monday morning I left to visit my friend Melanie and learn how to can. I had more than two 5-gallon buckets of green tomatoes, and stopped by Whole Foods on my way, to buy red peppers and onions, cilantro and jalapenos.

We spent almost six hours chopping, talking, boiling, and canning.

And we had several mishaps. For the first time ever, in many years of canning experience, she had a jar break while canning. The second batch of relish we made didn't fit in the pot nearly as well as the first batch. I realized, very belatedly, that I had used twice as many tomatoes as I should have! (Well, at least that's what I wanted to get rid of!)

In a brilliant move that proves that marketing is everything, we scorched the second batch, and the whole thing tasted, well, smokey. My first taste made me think it might be a total loss. Melanie tasted it and said, "Ah, a bit of smokey flavor, maybe a roasted pepper?" And then it didn't taste like "ruined food" but more like "upscale enchilada sauce." I like it.

I got home about an hour after I usually milk, and ran for the milking supplies. When I reached the dry lot, Bianca stood in the headgate, ready to be milked. Good girl!

Then I ate dinner, read to the boys, and went to bed with them at 9:30pm. I decided there had been too many days in a row that I had hated the 7:30am up-to-milk summons, and I needed to not be quite so exhausted. Ten hours of sleep did the trick.

Phil worked with the boys picking rocks out of the neighbor's field. When I saw the bed of the truck full of grapefruit-sized rocks and larger, what a job they did. (And Phil and I had to toss them all out, by ones and twos. In the future, we'll plan to put rocks in the bucket of the tractor, and then dump them as needed.)

Phil woke Tuesday feeling very sick. It would probably be prudent for us all to take an Airborne before (and after?) church, especially if any of us are in the nursery helping (as Phil did, a bit, on Sunday). He lay, huddled, under blankets, dozing.

But life on the farm doesn't stop because a person is sick. We had scheduled a seeder for delivery, and so it came. We probably got a machine a bit too high-tech for the job (since we ripped and disced, a regular seeder would have worked, but we got the more complex "no till drill"). The delivery guy, and his manager at the shop, couldn't tell us quite how to set the machine, but we have it, for two days.

Tuesday afternoon, Butch called to say that he wasn't going to be able to help us after all on Wednesday. Phil groaned, and dragged himself around. He got the seeder hooked up to the tractor, and started driving it around the orchard, to get a feel for how it works. He had done about half the apple orchard when we looked in the hopper. Almost all the clover seed we had put in for two acres was gone, but almost none of the ryegrass seed was gone. Odd.

This morning, Phil went to try seeding the cherry orchard, and soon got stuck. I tried to help pull him, the seeder, and the tractor out. It worked a lot better once I took the parking break off. (Ahem.)

Phil said that he would really prefer to wait to seed until Butch was available with his tractor. I cringed: we have decent weather (rain was forecasted for last night and today, but none fell); we have the seeder; we're rapidly passing the proper seeding time. So Phil headed next door.

He quickly realized that none of the rye seed had been sown last night. The residual seeds in the hopper had clogged the machine. Once he opened the setting very wide, and the random seeds (hopefully none genetically modified!) fell out, the seeder worked well.

And then, wonder of wonders, Butch showed up, riding his white steed, er, orange tractor! His job was cancelled for the day, so he drove up and down for almost eight hours, I'd guess, with Phil riding on the back of the seeder.

This has been a major undertaking, but the land next door is now ready for winter, ready for rains, ready for growth and newness. Very good.

For myself, I saved the goats today. I was cooking in the barn-kitchen when I heard a not-quite-human scream. We had been storing not-in-use electric netting in the field where the bucks hang out. They've been in that field for, oh, three weeks or so, and suddenly today they must have had the urge to get caught in the netting.

I found them, head to head, with lines of electric net under their chins and around their throats, twenty lines of netting around each of four horns. I almost despaired of getting them free, they had worked the netting so tightly.