A pair of farmer friends have this cartoon on their office wall:
I first saw it only two months after we bought our property. I got the joke and thought it was funny. Two and half years later, I really get the joke, and it’s not so funny anymore. Over winter, my To-Do list grew so long that I rewrote it in priority order and threw away all but the first two pages. If it’s not on the first page, it’s not getting done. I saved the second page only for posterity. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to look back at what you thought needed to be done and consider the impact not doing it had on your life. Then you shiver from the onset of Autumn’s cold and use the undone list to start the first fire of the season, take out a fresh notepad, and start another list.
It is only mid-February as I write this, official Spring is still over a month away, and already the pressure of a waking world is upon us. Our greenhouse shortcomings of the past two years have led us to a new solution for starting vegetables — grow tents in the big shop — which is a whole new approach and yet another learning curve for us to contend with. Set up and seeding is straightforward, but managing electricity consumption for lights and heat (plus shop lights, freezer #3, fence and tractor battery chargers, and two chick brooders) with limited outlets adds electrical engineering to the list of qualifications needed for this year’s attempts at the age-old practice of growing food.
Winter did not become the super-organizing zen preparation retreat I had hoped. Tools are still spread here and there, waiting to be sharpened, greased, or in some cases, simply found. Half-finished projects get moved from one corner of the workshop to the other, often to make room for the urgent at the expense of the critical. Fruit trees are now threatening flowers and most still wait to be pruned. The site of a failed canopy garage tent is now being grazed by ducks, the anchor screws still in the ground, marked by fence poles after being tripped on countless times. Maybe I’ll pull them out today, or maybe they’ll be discovered by the insect people of the distant future, piecing together the mysteries of the failed primate civilization.
Above, left to right: Farley in her happy place — starting seeds; legacy apple trees — pruning in progress; brooder setup is an easy one-time task, but when chicks arrive it becomes a daily item on the To Do list; a Golden Polish chick assesses her new home — Farley intends to make her a pet.
In addition to maintaining pigs through the winter, we kept a lot of birds from last season as a precaution against winter losses. While we didn’t lose any birds to illness this year (despite the high prevalence of Avian Influenza throughout the U.S. this winter — get ready for higher chicken prices), the predator pressure has been high and early. Coyotes have been coming in close, even in daytime. Eagles have swooped on our ducks right before our very eyes. Fly-overs by our ever-present pair of ravens are getting lower, bolder, and more frequent — twice while I type this! I can almost see the lust for eggs and meat in those intelligent, inquisitive eyes.
Keeping five species of poultry is a civics project in and of itself. Each bird likes a different style of nest, house, bath, chocolate, pillows, Netflix versus Amazon Prime. The demands to be fed start just before sunrise. Can I get you a glass of Champagne to go with your slug and clover leaf compost salad? Geese, Muscovy ducks, and turkeys are all seasonal breeders, and everybody is getting quite hormonal right about now. There have even been some cross-species breeding attempts. Naturally, it is the smallest drake attempting this... I guess he’s compensating for something. Mule ducks are a thing — maybe we’ll end up learning about them this year too.
Happy pigs on fresh pasture. Areas that held poultry last year have grown very well through winter.
We haven’t had much rain lately so the options for moving animals further out onto pasture are starting to open up, but the predator pressure increases as you move away from the center of operations so we haven’t been too ambitious yet. Separating bird groups and moving them away from favorable habitat near the house has yielded an immediate response from wild birds. It’s nice to see more of them, though it is concerning that so many varieties have shown up so early in the year. We’ve even seen European starlings setting up in one of the birdhouses on the shop — a cause for concern as this non-native is known for being aggressive and detrimental to to smaller, native species. As my friend Brett recently reminded me — everything wants to live.
I’m on their side, really I am, I just wish I could keep up! It’s times like this I’m quite jealous of our precious old man Buster, soaking up that sweet radiation from the wood stove, sleeping through most of the chaos, and waking from time to time to blindly enjoy the treats that fall from the sky. Running the gauntlet of a new season each year makes it increasingly undeniable –– none of us are getting any younger. Buster knows this all too well and has his priorities in order. I’m still trying to figure mine out.
