More Farm Stuff

The last few days on the farm have been so pleasant and interesting.  The weather got really chilly for a bit last week, but it started to warm up again over the weekend and is even meant to hit 93 on Thursday!

Yesterday, I took care of the chickens, which meant cleaning out the chicken coop and the feeding and watering dishes, as well as sweeping the sweepable area in the chicken pen.  Sounds easy enough, but nothing seemed to go right.  I missed that I was supposed to use a giant spade/shovel to scrape the poop out of the coop and instead ended up with a broom full of moist poop and poop smeared across the floor of the coop.  Then, while filling up the big water jug with the hose, I stuck my hand straight into a nice bush of stinging nettles.  Those nettles!  They keep grabbing at my legs and ankles and I keep brushing my hands and arms against them.  They’re horrible!  Once I get done with ALL that, I go to plug the hose back into the attachment to water one of the garden beds, except I’ve somehow managed to open up a hole in the side of the nozzle that is now shooting out water all over the place and I can’t figure out how to close it.  Honestly, this hose is all high-tech and I feel like I need an engineering degree to even use it.  It’s worse than a TV remote!  I had to shut the hose off and let the owner take care of it.  Not the most auspicious start to the week, but at least I learned something new and got treated to another wonderful, much needed lesson in…patience!

After cleaning out the chicken coop, I went to weed my newly sown beds of Mizuna and Bok Choi.  Little sprouts were starting to emerge from the soil where I’d sown the tiniest seeds last week – triumph!  The owner showed me which were the seedlings and left me to weed out everything else.  Here’s what the Mizuna seedling looks like:

I paid really close attention when she was showing me what my seedlings looked like so I wouldn’t accidentally pull them all out in the weeding.  “A two-leaf sprout” I remembered.  Except, in addition to my Mizuna above, this little two-leafer was all over the bed, as well:

Well, what do you think happened?  I pulled out all those seedlings I had just successfully sown and left that stupid weed in its place.  Can you believe it?!  I was so mad at myself!  Fortunately, the owner is really patient and kind.  She gave me some more seeds to sow and even joked about how, since I’d managed to leave a few of the seedlings behind in the bed, it would be like a succession planting.

At least the day ended well, as we had a bonfire.  It was a pretty good night for it – not too hot to enjoy the fire, but not so cold as to be miserable walking back to the house afterward.  We made stick-bread.  Have you heard of this?  The Germans taught us about it.  It’s a camping thing.  You take a long, thin branch and use a knife to strip the bark off of it.  Then, you take some bread dough, stretch it out like a long worm, wrap it around the stick, and then roast it over the fire like a marshmallow.  It reminded me of these cakes the Hungarians make, which are made of dough wrapped around some kind of pole and baked over a fire or an open oven.  I’m sure you could do the same thing with the stick-bread – just put a little cinnamon and sugar in the dough and bam:  stick-cake.  It was pretty fantastic.  We had some bread, cheese, salad, wine, and great company.

Today was a lot of painting.  Some of the older signs needed to be re-touched with new coloring as they had faded quite a bit over the last year since they were made.  I really enjoy the painting, and often just cover up whatever’s on the original sign and replace it with my own design.  It’s fun.

I also finished up my dragonfly:

The quote on the wings is from Rumi.  It says:

The ground’s generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty.  Try to be more like the ground.  Give back better, as rough clods return an ear of corn…

I thought that was a nice quote for a piece of garden art.

In the afternoon, I took a book out to the garden-side hammock for some relaxation.  There’s this beautiful purple flower bush I walk past to get to the garden that attracts an abundance of bees, moths and butterflies.  I took notice of a couple of these guys today and had to snap a photo:

I’ve never seen a butterfly like that before.  If you know what kind it is, let me know in the comments.  I also snapped a shot of one of the biggest bumble bees I’ve ever seen:

They have normal bees here, too, as well as massive hornets, but these giganto-bees really surprised me!  It probably goes without saying that there are a lot of bugs out here.  I had a grasshopper try and join me in the shower today.  There’s a dog here who’s gotten very good at catching the flies and moths constantly buzzing and fluttering around his head.  It’s quite amusing to watch him go after them.

TL;DR:  Rookie mistakes and good times on the farm.