We Keep Talking

I woke shortly after 4am to a terrific rainstorm. I am liking the earlier rising: I got in a good three hours of work before any boys were up to distract me (or need feeding).

With the short deluge, it was a bit too wet to kill a pig (Phil said it would be awful to be slipping around while trying to aim). He went out to work on the broken auger that has been the bane of our existence for several months now.

Last week when we sold our piglet, Phil jammed his thumb very hard while making a grab. It has continued to bother him, and the little pounding he had to do not only warped the metal he was trying to fix, but set his thumb to throbbing. Nothing is ever easy!

After a time to cool down, he went back and did something magical, so that the auger is now working (we think).

I spent a few hours hunting down the raspberries I planted along one swale this spring. I dug them up and transplanted them into the greenhouse, weeding a bit as I went. A good many raspberries had either died or been trampled, but maybe that's just as well: after several hours of weeding and mucking about in the very wet greenhouse soil, I was tired.

Our soil expert said that it's actually a good thing we haven't covered the greenhouse yet. The sodium in our soil is high, due to all the compost added, but after a winter of leaching, it should be much better.

This evening, Phil and I had a continuation of our conversation about the animals: what do we keep? What do we sell? What do we need to put in the freezer? We are closing in on what we most want and need. And we talked through what to do about the stone fruit orchard, coming to a better understanding of what needs to be transplanted, what needs to move.

That's good!