Planing and Sawing

I asked Phil this morning what he had done yesterday—I hadn't seen him much, and was curious. He had done a bunch of little tasks: started to put in a cut-off switch for the pump, so we won't run it dry (finished that today); started to set up the sawmill; started to plane his new work table. A day where he was on the go the whole time, but didn't finish much.

Today, he was very pleased with the finished appearance of his table, planed sufficiently and varnished.

The incredible windstorm and rainstorm overnight woke me several times: the trailer was rocking! Our rain gauge, we realized this morning, must have had the water left in it after the last big rain, and it broke on freezing. Phil estimates two inches fell. Happily, he was able to bring the cows a hay bale: I wasn't sure he would be able to get to them.

In the late afternoon, Phil started to saw for our friend. He did one 8' long log, which yielded 93 board feet. He was pleased, overall, with how easily that went.

Our string of strange breakages continues, however: Phil realized yesterday that he damaged a section of the sawmill when he dragged it up the slope. And today he put a new blade in, and at some point, it caught on a metal post. So he'll put in a new blade. So strange to have something break every day!

Phil asked a local farmer if we have worse luck than usual. "Oh, no! You can be sure that whenever you must desperately need something, that's when it will break. Farmers fix things constantly."

Is that encouraging? Hmm.

With the strong wind blowing all day, I went outside as little as possible. I figure I got a lifetime of wind when we lived in Boulder, and I'd just as soon avoid it. The three younger boys put up the mattress and spread out with pattern blocks, cars, Playmobil, and Duplos (Phil was thankful the Legos didn't join the mass of bright plastic on the floor). Jadon and I read. It was a good day.

A Haiku for You

In my new robe
this morning —
someone else.

Famous haiku writer Basho wrote that poem. I like the idea that every morning you get up and you're a little bit different than you were the next day. Every day, a new you.

A strong, warm wind blew all day, sometimes with little flurries of rain. It wasn't until dark fell that the torrents came down.

I spent my farm hours today weeding around trees. I started out trying to dig up grass patches in the comfrey, then considered weeding between trees in the rows, but that seemed ridiculous. So I did spot weeding right around the trees: one of these days, we'll bring peastone up and keep the ring around the trees clean.

Yesterday I went and checked my hives. The two swarms last year are doing great: they have two deeps still heavy with honey. The original hive, though (the one I didn't feed supplemental honey to), was very light. The super was empty, as was the bottom deep. I swapped the bottom deep and the top deep (not full of honey, but with some at least), and plan to start feeding that hive soon. Today would have been good, but I forgot.

My First Outdoor Work of the Year

Yesterday morning I headed out to the bread-baking area of the barn to make breakfast: toaster oven, Nutrimill, KitchenAid, all lined up for me to make the two loaves for the day.

Except that the KitchenAid was gone. Gone!

A strange thing for a thief to steal, in a strange place. Why come all the way down the driveway, right by the house, to take the KitchenAid but not the toaster oven? What?

Phil came to the barn. "Did you even look? The KitchenAid is right there!"

And it was: lying on its side, bread hook snapped clean in half. I use the bread hook every day. The dratted dog must have jumped up to get ... cat? mouse? food? I'm using the paddle for the moment to mix the bread, but that's not really a kneading action, and it's not good for the motor.

Another strange accident in an ongoing string of unfortunate accidents.

Today was a glorious day: weather in the 70s, sun. Phil was up in town most of the day; I spent two hours cleaning out the little greenhouse. I didn't finish (photo is "after," so you can imagine the "before"). It makes me excited to think about this year's growing!

A friend called Phil yesterday: boards at the local mill had gone up from $5.50 to $9. So the friend will bring the logs from his farm, and Phil will custom saw them. This is the first time we've tried such a thing, so we'll see how it goes.

Phil headed down to get the sawmill from the lower pasture. Because of his trip to town, it was dark as he was getting it packed up to move. I headed over to open gates for him, as he would have to drive up through the cow herd. I went to stop the water; while there, I noticed that a line of fence seemed down.

It was quite dark by then, and I didn't know if the electric fence was actually off. As I came to where I thought lines should be, I would swing my sweatshirt out to see if it met with resistance. None. And the cows are trained to follow people to new paddocks, so as I went down slope to tell Phil that a line was down, all 14 cows followed me. A few looked like they tripped a bit on the downed line, as they hopped and bucked.

But it seemed counter-productive to fetch Phil, leading the cows ever farther from their proper paddock. So I headed back upslope and then just stood, surrounded by potential live electric wire, frisky cows, and darkness.

When Phil, mill in tow, finally came upslope, we opted to leave the cows as they are for the night.

But a semi-permanent fence line going down: that hasn't happened before. That was today's odd accident.

Pictures of Projects

My camera's card stopped dumping photos onto the computer a week ago (perhaps the fine red dust finally settled too thickly in that small opening). Phil, though, showed me how to dump photos via a cord, so my blog will be more visually pleasant again.

The boys have bulb crates where they keep their special things. Abraham's crate had started to overflow, so we worked together to clear it out.

Actually, he had few toys and gifts in the crate. Mostly he had drawings he's worked on over the last four or five months. A lot of drawings. A whole stack of drawings. I had expected to be able to easily eliminate massive amounts of the papers, but as I started to look, I found myself captivated again by the little Buzz Lightyears and stuffed monkeys and sharks; the little characters, drawn carefully (and repeatedly) in pen and pencil. Thousands of little figures. In the end, I just put them all in a box, labeled it with the year, and put it in the storage trailer. Paying it forward.

Phil returned from a trip to town last week with a startling announcement: "I've returned with urinals!" He remembered reading about gardens that have straw bales for the male workers to use to start the recycling process of nutrients to garden fertility. Great idea.

But the dog, aided and abetted by the chicken and guinea, made short work of that "urinal."

Phil spent Saturday chipping, once Jadon and Isaiah shoveled out the back of the truck from the chips on Friday. Jadon helped him then, until they grew hungry for lunch. The truck got stuck. Phil got the truck free. It was a day of chipping. I was feeling pleased with the quantity of chips we're getting, until I reread in Gaia's Garden that a truck load of wood chips will cover about 50 square feet of garden. At a truck load a day, we're not getting a huge amount of new garden fertility. Hmm.

Sunday I went back through my underlined notes, trying to list the various plants the author recommends for various purposes. After several hours, and with a hundred dense pages yet to go, I gave up: it's overwhelming, how many interesting and enticing plants there are! I've ordered my vegetable seeds: now it's time to find some less usual seeds.

We woke today to rain, which effectively ruled out any lower pasture work: too slippery. So Phil and Jadon headed up to the barn to design and build a workbench.

It turned out well, and Phil is loving the extra work space. I suppose a his workroom is like my kitchen: the more counter space, the better.

Isaiah and Jadon have been playing on a pulley system that sends them up to the roof and back down. It reminds me of the hayloft games of the last century.

A few daffodils have started to poke out in the apple orchard. The photo shows a tree I weeded last year, and I'm hoping that I can weed and put peastone down in the center of the daffodils at some point this spring.

After so many days of cold, the thaw came today. Phil was glad to shower. As for me, my hair still is looking cute after nine days of no maintenance. How was I surviving with the longer hair before? Ouch!

And I was glad, too, to see a cheery golden sunset.

Bathing Bummer

Phil chipped in the lower pasture. It was a normal day chipping: boys shoveled yesterday's chips out of the truck; Jadon went down with Phil until they came up for a break and the truck got stuck; the chipper had a piece keep falling off.

By dusk, Phil came up, smelling of some petroleum product (or several), excited to bathe. Our water lines had finally thawed as we broke freezing today (yay!), and so we did the dishes and the boys bathed while Phil made dinner.

Isaiah always bathes last. He is famous in our family for his 45 minute showers. I'm not sure what he does in the bathroom all that time. I know that he sat in front of the heater for about ten minutes, drying off, before he started getting dressed.

A 45 minute shower really depletes our hot water, though, so rather than showering right after Isaiah, Phil waited a bit.

Dutiful Isaiah turned off the space heater in the RV. We've been eating in the trailer this week, and Isaiah had no way to know that the heater has been running 24 hours a day this wekk, trying to keep the lines thawed. Usually we view untended space heaters as a liability, and so he followed proper energy conservation and fire danger practices when he left the trailer to come and read with me and the brothers before bed.

When Phil headed over shortly afterwards, he found the RV dark and cold. And frozen.

Poor guy!

A Paradigm Changing Page

Get over it ... farming doesn't pay. More accurately, though, it is our economic system that fails to describe accurately what agriculture is, what is does, and the true value that agriculture has for humanity. Agriculture is what it is and it doesn't fit into the nice, tidy box of economic theory. Living on a farm or ranch and paying the bills with wildly erratic and oftentimes tiny cash flows is a challenge for everybody who is doing it.

....

My advice is to get over it. Your agricultural enterprise probably will not pay all of your bills. Don't beat yourself up over this. Don't hold yourself up to a standard that the entire agricultural economy is not attaining.

This doesn't mean don't get into farming or ranching. What it does mean is understand that you are playing blackjack against "the house" and the house is using a rigged deck. Rural life is an incredibly rewarding lifestyle and despite the fact that farming doesn't really pay, we can figure out how to stay in the countryside, stay on the farm and live a good life. Going out of business is one of the many forms of unsustainability.

Almost two years ago now, permaculture expert Mark Shepard came to do a private training session on the farm. (He had hoped to make it a more broad workshop, but I was overwhelmed with the details. So it was just Phil and I and my parents for the weekend.)

His book, Restoration Agriculture, came out recently, and I started to read my copy late last night. After admiring the pictures of his farm, I started reading, pretty randomly, near the end. And the above quote stood out to me.

The last year I have been beating myself up, feeling that we have a full-time hobby farm and little to show for it, without a really viable option for actually making a living. That may be realistic, or that may be pessimistic (and it certainly isn't prophetic); whether it ends up being true or not, it isn't hopeful.

And then I remembered that Mark had said something similar: "Stay on the land. Get a job at a gas station, work as a bartender in your off hours, just do what you must to stay on the land."

I don't know if I can express how freeing it was to read that page. That's right—there are rewarding parts of this lifestyle. (I had almost forgotten.) I have a good life. (I had had some doubts.)

Though I realize it is foolish to entirely remove money from the good life equation, to realize that we are making it, month by month, seems a bit more of an accomplishment than it did two days ago. I'm playing against a stacked deck. Okay. I can keep going.

Phil Troubleshooting in the Cold

Phil has been working out in the 20 degree weather, in the wind and driving light snow. I go outside as little as possible.

Thursday morning, Phil managed to reassemble the chipper entirely. He had had a hard time with the bearings, but by hooking on a clamp or something, he managed to whack everything together in short order.

Then it was time to deal with the clutch. He had tried to bleed the line before, but it hadn't made much difference. "I know what I did wrong, though." Unfortunately, the plastic tubing required could not be found, so that was a 90 minute trip to town.

We worked on bleeding the line for some time. The clutch finally started to have some resistance, but suddenly it didn't. I checked the fluid reservoir, and it looked almost empty. I wonder, in retrospect, if it had gotten empty, and more air went into the line (the book cautioned against this; otherwise, you have to start over). A few more attempts, but finally Phil just refilled the reservoir and pumped the clutch hundreds of times. Now it works well.

Was that hour or two we spent in the Big Blue Barn what made the difference? Who knows.

But the day was far gone, and by the time Phil brought hay and minerals to the cows, and got the chipper hooked back to the tractor, the day was done.

The water had frozen in the line to the cows yesterday. So today that was a first priority: get water for the cows.

Well, first Phil went out to make eggs for breakfast. I think he was getting water for his coffee. He turned the spigot on. And it came undone so he couldn't turn it off!

The water on the ground froze quickly. If that had happened to me, I don't know what I would have done. I don't know what he did, but he finally managed to get it stopped.

Happy breakfast making!

The line to the cows was not going to work, so he headed up to fill the tank on the trailer. After 100 gallons, the pump ran out.

Is our well almost dry? Is this an extreme cold thing? It's too bad Phil wasn't here when the service guys came last year to put in a new pump. It would have been interesting to have them measure the actual water level.

With that sobering bit of frustration, Phil took the 100 gallons over to the cows. They finished much of it, while he took the tank and trailer down to the creek.

The pump we bought last September to drain our "pool" did not come with instructions. So Phil spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to make it work. But finally the tank was filling.

Then Phil fell into the creek! It sounded like quite a tumble, but thankfully, though he fell head-first out of the trailer, he ended up on his feet. Boots, pants, over pants all soaked. And quickly frozen. But he didn't drown in the ice water.

It actually hadn't occurred to me until right now that that could have been the end of him: drowned in the freezing waters of the creek. He's often with the cows for an hour. I wouldn't have gone to look for him for a long time. Some things are better not to imagine.

When the cows were watered again, he left the water trailer, changed clothes, warmed up, hooked up the chipper (again), and headed down.

For about four hours, he was down in the lower pasture, working in the cold air. For those four hours, nothing broke, everything worked. Four hours of the precious wood chips pouring into the back of the truck.

Then, at 6pm, when it was quite dark, he started to head up the slope. But the light snow had slicked over. Despite the frozen ground, there was no chance of him coming up slope with either truck or tractor tonight.

But with all the setbacks of this week, he returned in good spirits.