Taking care of business

Balancing farm life and writing

Hi friend,

I planned to post the last installment of my Basketball Cybernetics series yesterday, but life sorta got in the way. So I thought I’d share what I got up to yesterday. While busy, it was a not-atypical day in our off-grid herb farming life.

Also, it has felt like there’s more static than usual in my brainwaves the last three days. Might have something to do with the impending end of both the Venus and Mercury retrogrades. Or maybe it’s the off-the-charts NEXRAD activity across the Southeast as the weather authorities seem to be brewing up another set of super-storms for us this week.

Whatever the cause, the effect is that I’m sitting here on a Thursday morning feeling brain-fogged. And, I have an hour before I have to go to my other farm job and I’m working on rebuilding my writing momentum after a long break. So, I decided to get a little “day in the life” letter out to you. Here goes and I hope you enjoy it.

Wednesday morning

We got up and had coffee and then took the dog down to the garden. This is our usual mode. Kobi gets to run around a big fenced-in area, dig for moles, bark at goats, and generally feel free to be his best doggy self. During the winter, Tatiana and I spent a lot of our morning garden time sitting and talking or just visualizing what we wanted to create once the weather got better.

About two weeks ago, Mother Nature flipped her switch to All Systems Grow and the perennial plants (and the grass and weeds) just started blasting up. Suddenly, there’s a lot to do and it needs to be done fairly quickly!

I spent a lot of my garden time last week dismantling an 80-foot by 30-foot high tunnel that, we finally decided, was too big for us to use. So I spent some time this morning raking, hoeing and digging out some of the weeds that had taken over that plot. We’re going to plant a little permaculture mini-forest in there and the sooner I can get it cleared the sooner I can move some of the elder trees that are starting to crowd each other out in the shade house at the top of the garden.

Some photos:

Two weeks ago, this motherwort was about three inches high. Boom!

St. John’s Wort and yarrow, two of our favorite beauties.

I planted these baby Calendulas last week from seeds Tatiana had saved from a bed that did particularly well last year. They are wasting no time.

So yeah, the growing season is underway. Since it’s still reasonably cool most days, it’s tempting to stay in the garden for hours and hours. But we’re trying to be disciplined because (a) since we’re mostly growing perennial herbs and (b) since we put so much work into the garden last year, we can get away with focusing some time and energy on other projects. Of which there are a few.

Wednesday afternoon

So, we headed back up for breakfast (now brunch) after a 90-minute session in the garden. Last Thursday I was getting ready to head to my farm job and I loaded up Big Red, my 1996 Dodge farm truck, got behind the wheel and turned the key and…

The key just turned freely in the ignition cylinder. No power, no lights, nothing.

So I ordered a new ignition cylinder on Amazon. Watched a couple YouTube videos and set about replacing the ignition cylinder. Only to find I needed a special Torx “security bit” that I didn’t own to removed the ignition switch from the steering column. Tatiana had grabbed one for me at the auto parts store on Tuesday, so while she was making breakfast I went back to work on the truck.

It took longer than promised by the YouTube guy, mostly because a piece of metal had broken off inside the old cylinder and jammed things up, making it harder to remove than expected. But I eventually got the old one out and the new one in. Reconnected the truck battery, took a deep breath, turned the key, and…VROOM!

Big Red is back in action.

Which was great, because we needed to head over to the Mennonite community and get more supplies for the studio we’re building. (A big reason, although not the only one, why I’ve been writing so infrequently = not having any kind of dedicated creative work space. Also, Tatiana has been doing most of her client sessions in the minivan for a year and a half — which is actually very pleasant when the weather is nice; great views, birds chirping, leaves rustling in the trees. But not so nice when it’s freezing cold or brutally hot and humid.)

We now have three of our five windows in the studio but I needed to finish caulking around the trim of the two big south side windows so Tatiana could get them painted before the next monsoon blows in this weekend.

Got that done.

Had a coffee break and realized we still had time to get to the Mennonite lumberyard before they closed at five. Loaded up the dog and headed over. I really love living so close to the Mennonites and the guys at the lumberyard — now that they know and trust us — are super sweet. We got the last two windows for the studio, roofing nails, painter’s caulk, a new circular saw blade, ten gallons of ethanol-free gas for the generators and lawnmower, and some irrigation parts to expand the irrigation to our brand new permaculture garden area (and to fix a leaky section of pipe down near the well pump).

Wednesday evening

By the time we got back, it was time for Kobi’s second walk of the day (you know doggies and their routines) so we walked back down to the garden — it’s about eight minutes from our little cabin down to the garden at a leisurely pace. I was kinda tired at this point and really felt like just sitting and soaking up the greenery and the sound of the frogs singing in the little pond across the fence in the goat pasture.

But Tatiana was weed-whacking up by the little flower bed she planted at the top of the driveway last year and as I looked at how fast the grass was growing around the garden beds and thought about the weather system that’s supposed to hit this weekend, I decided I wanted to mow some areas that hadn’t been mowed yet this year.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I looked at how high and thick the grass had already grown and thought, “It’s now or never. If I don’t hack this back a little bit it’s gonna be too high to mow by the time it dries out again after the rain.”

It was 6:30 pm by the time we headed back up the hill. I told myself that with a little dinner under my belt I might rally and finish my basketball cybernetics series. I even did my best to visualize myself happily working on it and completing it — psycho-cybernetics style — but the body had other ideas.

I’ll leave you with one last photo and best wishes for a great Jupiter-Day (Thursday/Thors-day).

Kobi and I at the end of a good day — ready to go get some din-dins!