Phil's Day to Shine

On Thursday, I delivered our ewes Eve and Zara, and our black ram Bouncy, to their new home about 70 miles away. While I was away, Phil fixed the water pump in the motor home. For the last several months, we've had the water line hooked up directly and perpetually to the spigot. This is fine in summer, but once the weather freezes, this will halt our running water, so Phil was prudent to fix that now.

He also fixed the little greenhouse (partially dismantled back in June to allow some chicks a stress-free environment while we took the cattle trailer to pick up a cow) and moved his table saw in there. A workspace for bad weather: another timely task completed.

Today, Phil had a brilliant idea. Well, first he had to return the escaped pigs to their proper pen, and re-establish the electric line all the way around. We don't think the big ones will get out again, and maybe not the little ones, either. It didn't take him long, and for a time, we enjoyed the pastoral aspect of the stone fruit with pigs grazing clover and loafing in the sunshine.

We had lent our tiller out for a bit, and it came back unusable. We had looked into replacing the broken part, but after I stood at Tractor Supply for the better part of an hour yesterday and came away no closer to a repair than I began, Phil figured out a fix on his own.

What a relief! We have plenty we want to till.

First, Phil tilled the uphill slope by the big greenhouse. We have lost a good portion of that slope to erosion, and we want to grow a good stand of rye grass, oats, and buckwheat.

Phil broadcast the seeds by hand, while first one chicken, then several, came to eat the seeds frantically.

Phil raked them in.

Joe ran his truck around the seed bed.

With this project done, Phil had another great thought. The T-Tape we had put down for our failed market garden needed to come up. I had tried to roll the sections, one by one, around sticks. This took forever, because I had to free the tape inch by inch from a claustrophobic mass of dense grass.

Worse, the neat rolls did not stay neat for long. Whether through the inquisitiveness of chickens, or perhaps just chance, the rolls ended up horribly entangled. Such a discouraging mess. Should we just chuck it all?

Then Phil looked at our hose roller. We never use it for hose: all our hoses are joined to make 300' and more. But the hose winder makes a great T-Tape roller! So with Phil managing the rolling, and I doing whatever I could to free the lines from their entanglements, we rolled 16 lengths in a reasonably short time, and Phil was able to begin tilling the garden.

He didn't finish with the tilling before dark fell. Some of the sections tilled were not plowed back in the spring, and they were slow going.

I took a few last photos of flowers.

One plant produced both pink and yellow flowers.

Quite nice.

And while no man is an island, some chard may be: we didn't quite have the heart to turn under our intrepid chard, steadily producing since May. Of course, we haven't eaten much of it, as chard isn't high on my list of favorite vegetables, but it is so pretty, and maybe one of these days I will deeply desire some pink vegetable with a slightly bitter flavor. Stranger things have happened.

I picked a few final peppers, before the pepper plants return to the soil.

Oh: and whether it was from Phil's good cleaning of the chicken house, or from the calcium supplement we began feeding the hens on the same day, we jumped from 12 eggs yesterday to 28 this morning. Any day we more than double production is a good day in my book.

And, just for good measure: you never know what you'll find around the farm! Today, the trotters turned up in a few random locations.