Goodish news from our farm. Nearly all the crops are in and the garden is kinda planted. My fruit trees are looking good and about 80% are alive. I went ahead and bought a couple more Honey Crisp apple trees (hope springs eternal). We (meaning Mike and the Soil and Water Conservation District) planted 400 trees last week -- choke cherry, choke berry, prairie plum, hazelnut, black walnut, spruce... There is dandelion wine bubbling on the counter, preserved nettles, asparagus to eat most days, and strawberries coming.
Mike and the boys butchered two "spent" hens this morning and they are slow cooking in a crock pot. I made fresh dough for buns and a cold watermelon waits in the fridge. Maybe it's part of the learning curve, but Mike said that the tired old hen he butchered had 20 eggs inside, in various stages of development. It was literally a "hands on" biology lesson for the boys.
We have only 20 acres of cropland left to plant to a warm season grass/grain like millet for a hay crop to feed the cattle over winter. By the way, we decided to roll the dice and went with 95 day corn that was planted around June 9th. We could take some friendly wagers as to whether we'll see a harvestable corn grain crop from that.
We're grateful to our friend and farmer Todd on whom the 'burden' of getting in the crops falls. He just got seed into the bottom land yesterday.
Sorry to say that today it is under water. Again.
Last night thunderstorms, tornado warnings, and a torrential downpour put another 50-60 acres under water. All those acres had been planted to soybeans. The storms knocked out the power for 2+hours and caused water to leak through my ceiling. Though that was entirely my fault. I left the attic windows open and the horizontal driving rain pooled on the attic floor and then leaked through my bedroom ceiling. I looked at the gallon of dead black flies floating in water in the middle of a pink bean bag chair (stored in the attic) and think "who's gonna clean up that yucky mess?"
Does anyone else find it exceeding hard to believe that we are the adults in charge? Feels like I should just be the footloose, responsibility-free kid who can curl up during a storm with a Nancy Drew novel and a bag of black jelly beans. Sometimes is just strikes me as humorous that I'm the mom/homeowner/responsible party.
I digress (regress).
By the way... I generally rise to the occasion of being a grown up. But the other day I picked the kids up from the rural intersection where the swimming lesson bus drops them off. That corner is the staging area for Big Stone County road repair and has an irresistible mountain/fortress of sandy gravel. I told the kids we should play on it. So we ran to the top and I had the great idea that you could jump off the side (30 feet high) and have the sandy gravel break my fall as I slid to the bottom. So I jumped out over the edge and crashed into, essentially, cementized rock. Bloodied and scratched, I take the kids home saying "Look at my owie!!" When Mike sprayed the bacitracin on my wounds I screamed like the kids do "OUCH-- it stings! It HURTs! Stop it." I was surprised to see him smile.
Well... up to the attic to mop up mounds of soggy dead flies.
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