Almost Done

We have interior space now. Our neighbor stopped by Friday afternoon and helped Phil jump ahead on panels. He had one section of insulation, four panels to put up, one panel to finish, and the back trim as of Friday night.

Saturday I was off farm for much of the day, but Phil and the boys worked together. They moved the cows from the finger to the neighbors to the south, and Phil described the large help that they were. Isaiah maneuvered the tractor, and both older boys helped wind up electric line. Phil told Abraham to grab a hose "over there," so Abraham wandered the hill for a long time, looking for this mythical hose. (With more specific instructions, he was able to locate it, but how precious, to wander a hillside, faithfully searching.)

Once I returned in the late afternoon, Phil put in the last four panels. He has to trim the back edge and put on the final bit of waterproofing. One more day's work.

Phil cavorted around the interior space. Enormous, white, mostly empty: it's fun to imagine the possibilities.

I have now basically finished weeding the planting of year-old comfrey roots. I did four rows of comfrey a day all week. Thursday I had a single patch to go, but it was screaming "black widow" to me for some reason, and my disposable gloves I had worn to deal with insulation and then comfrey were torn and falling apart.

Friday, wearing gardening gloves, I found a black widow in that patch. Of course, I thought. No wonder I felt I needed to quit.

Five seconds later, I killed another one.

Two inches more, and there was a third.

I hadn't been weeding two minutes yet, and I had killed three black widows.

It made it psychologically uncomfortable to carry on. And although I only found and killed two more that afternoon, I was jumpy the entire time. It's not a happy thing to find infinitely more black widows than earthworms, but since no worms appeared, that's what happened.

I think we have 80 plants that have survived the heat of summer, and none are enormous. The hope was that they would shield out weeds after a few weeks, but that has not happened.

I dug up one medium-sized greenhouse comfrey, started from a two-inch clipping in mid-May. What gorgeous roots! I trimmed three or four lengths off the bottom, and planted those in the greenhouse where three or four roots hadn't come up. I'm trying to be more diligent now, actually fertilizing both in the hole and pouring compost over the top of each emergent plant and root cutting. This project will take some time.

Once I had trimmed as much as I felt comfortable trimming, I transplanted the comfrey plant to an empty place in the orchard. The transplanted comfrey is on the left in the photo, the year-old root on the right. Apparently, our soil actually is better in the greenhouse.

One final bit of trivia: our neighbor told of a dog of his, how the dog was bit by a copperhead. The dog's head swelled up, eyes swelled shut, hard to breath, hard to drink. The symptoms were identical to what happened to the late calf Denise. And, really, that makes the most sense. The symptoms didn't seem to fit exactly with anything in the books. I think it probably was a snakebite. Was there anything we could have done, or an anti-venom the vet could have delivered? I don't know. Would it have been worth it to pay a vet to come out? Debatable: she wasn't strong to begin with.

But good to know, should we face this in the future.