We have been running full steam since late June, 6 days a week till dark with some work on Sundays. This time of year, we harvest Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Tuesdays, we spend all morning packing up CSA bags and I leave by 2pm and get home around 9 pm. Saturdays, we pack up and leave the farm by 5:30 am. That leaves Thursdays and Sundays to do other farm work, and we don’t work on Sundays if we can help it.
Jenifer has it worse than me. She has to cook, clean house, and ferry Ellie and Levi to various summer camps, doctor appointments, and birthday parties.
After getting home at 9:30 pm Tuesday night from the Tailgate market dealing with weather and traffic, I decided to take Wednesday morning off. Wednesday morning, I decided to take the entire day off…
I had plenty of rain day activities to do, organize my office, clean up the barn, figure out how to transfer data from our desktop to a used laptop we got, etc. I did none of that.
I could of pulled on my rubber boots and mucked around in the squash that we did not harvest Monday because we ran out of daylight and I could of been pulling tomatoes Wednesday before they split open but I did none of that. I did nothing.
I did help Levi gather eggs because Ellie was at a softball camp and tended the young turkeys but basically I did nothing all day. It was extremely enjoyable.
Happy Cows
Tuesday morning at 7:30, a neighbor called and said “your cows are out.” I called my dad and said “your cows are out.”
They were not hard to find, they were happily munching in our sweet corn patch we had planned on harvesting Wednesday. About 15 cows and calves.
The fence was not down, the fence charger was working, the cows had popped open a gate near my brother’s house, did not leave hoof mark in his yard, walked down his driveway, and visited almost every section on our gardens.
I have corn planted in 5 different plots spread over a few acres. Late sweet corn, really late sweet corn, popcorn, an heirloom variety called limbercob, and a 3 sisters test plot. The cows visited them all.
They also nosed open the slide on the boot on the bottom of our 2-ton feed bin full of chicken feed and spilt about 15 5 gallon buckets worth of chicken feed on the ground.
Because we had gotten 1.5″ of rain the night before, there was a muddy ring around the feed bin, as well as around our heirloom apple trees that the cows apparently enjoyed knocking off the apples off of.
My dad and I got the cows back in.
The cows and calves had a big morning of adventure, and you just can’t buy that sort of morning entertainment anywhere… At least that was what I telling myself between bouts of muttering and cussing under my breath and kicking fence posts and giggling insanely at the situation.
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Comment on “Turkey killer gets a stern lecture” – Did you ever think the poor owl was hurt; therefore it couldn’t hunt like healthy raptor and had resorted to killing a turkey (twice) as it did because it was hungry? Perhaps because of his leg injury, he could not “attack from above with his razor-sharp etc….” I would have placed one of the dead turkeys close to him away from the others. Maybe you didn’t understand the entire situation….he was hungry and was killing the only way he could so he could eat.