It's The Dirt | It is all about how we live here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens: Intensely, simply, creatively, lovingly for God, with others.

A Month? For Reals? No Way!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Lanny

But it appears to be true!

It has been a month since I last wrote a post, Huh, there isn’t even a crummy rough draft in the tool shed to throw at the blog. This must come to an end, but unless I find some accidental money and hire four extra people I doubt I will ever go long without a long pause.

I did run into a toxic overload right at the same time as my last post. I traced the beginning of the overload to liming without a mask, a sandwich from Jimmy Johns, and a bunch of stuff in between, nothing terrible just a lot that added up. I spent weeks itching in all sorts of places, mostly my eyes, which also looked at one time like the Michelin Tire Man, nose, lips, face, ears, eustachian tubes if only I could get to them… oh, excuse me, the pharyngotympanic tubes. And a bunch of other places, it went randomly all over, not quite all over all over but almost. I took four thousand oatmeal, lavender, jojoba oil baths, avoided a bunch of stuff and was basically more miserable for three weeks than usual. So on top of being slammed busy from normal work and extra storm work and another record breaking rain accumulation the last three months… argh.

I was looking, am still looking, at purchasing the perfect label maker for VF&G, in my research I came across a productivity guru. So I ordered his book, print and audio, from the library. Very good. I’ll tell you about it when we implement his ideas. Anywho, he says in the beginning of his spiel, that within four weeks there will be something tossed into your life that knocks you off balance, makes you have to recalibrate. I may have been skeptical about a few things that he has said, but not that. I know that is true. I wouldn’t even have to wait until four weeks, I’d say weekly I have stuff come up that throws me off of what I had intended to do, the direction I was headed, my goals, or vision.

During the ice storm that not only threw us off then, it is the gift that just keeps on giving, while cleaning off the tarp garage over the trailer I fell from the ladder into an ice bank. I looked down and was staring at the bottom of my boot, ow. I limped big time that week, first I cried, nobody was home, so I just sat and cried, then I limped. It’s been sorta tender off and on since but then all of a sudden round the first of April it started to hurt like I first injured it. This last weekend boy howdy pain. So today I bought a stabilizer and I have it on right now, I hope it works.

But this last Saturday really threw Dirt and I. He had a shearing job out on the Peninsula. To make it worth his time he took his bike. Motersickle. And he asked if any one wanted to come with him. I passed on a few trips last year and I think I ended up on only one bike trip. Determined not to end the year like that again this year I opted to go in spite of knee deep work, oh wait that’s the mud, the work is neck deep. Any way off we went.

An hour plus and we arrived, sheared three sheep, on the last one Dirt sheared off a growth on its shoulder (common occurrence) ugly and gross, time to go. I went to put my helmet on and my head lit on fire. Bee sting. Dirt was insensitively yelling at me but that was because the bee was still on my head and I was risking a second stinging in his world. Bee gone, on the road again.

We stopped at Costco. Got off the bike put helmets and jackets in a basket (cart) and headed to the door. I had put my ear buds in my ears to block out the fact that I was in public in less than stellar conditions. All of a sudden commotion erupts, Dirt is looking around weird like, a woman is throwing her baby at another woman, the ear buds come out, I hear screaming and Dirt takes off away from the front door towards the parking lot exit.

A motorcyclist, a crotch rocket rider actually, was leaving work, sped through to the exit lane popped a wheelie, hit an SUV and slammed head on into a mid size truck.

Dirt helped another Costco employee keep him still. Blood was coming out of the helmet, they didn’t move his head, body parts were not pointing in the right directions. The professionals arrived and took over. Dirt came back up to where I was waiting for him. I knew I could not handle any more extra trauma in my life and there were plenty of people taking care of the situation. I did at one point want to go and minister to the drivers of the vehicles, been there done that, I know how devastating it can be to not cause someone’s death but be part of the collision. Ugh. But I could feel myself already not doing well, numbing out, so I chose to wait. Dirt rejoined me and we went into Costco. Is he dead? I asked.

No.

Will he be?

He’s in bad shape but he’s alive.

No more asking.

How were the other drivers?

The guy in the truck is tough.

Why are we here?

Ham.

Sausage too?

Yeah.

Numb ride the rest of the way home, not scared, numb. Some poor mom. Her day just got ruined. I think of it every time I have to wave at an oncoming bike (rules of the road, you wave at other bikers) and when they are crotch rockets, I wanna give them a wave of a different kind. I think of the three yahoos who go down my highway regularly, at top speed on one tire. Man that makes me angry, someday they are going to ruin someone’s day, life, and their poor moms’.

Dang.

Numb

Selfish people.

Dang.

Enjoyed Easter with our kids and their kids. It was a great day. Beautiful, sunny, reconciling Resurrection celebration with others who know, understand, it was very good. After everyone left Dirt checked on Jordan, he didn’t make it. Dang.

Yes, there is at least one thing monthly that shakes your world.

Categories: Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Wooly Onions

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Lanny

Some experiments succeed, some experiments fail. And others hang in this sort of “I’m not so sure” grey area.

The experiment in question:

Use wool to mulch overwinter onions.

Why wool as a mulch?

The wool that Dirt’s sheep produce is marginal at best. We also do not have the equipment at this time to deal with the raw fleeces, to send the wool out to be processed into something my girls could spin up is expensive for what the final product from our wool is…. and so on. Plus some of his shearing customers beg him to take their unusable wool as well. Therefore we end up with a lot of waste wool.

It could go into the big compost piles, it does add to the need of compost for potting soil and side dressing. But I also need a nice thick mulch for overwinter stuff. So last fall I tried it. I tried leaves in another spot in the Market Garden, the leaves left. But that is another story.

This experiment was a bit hard to read:

I was late in planting the onion seed resulting in plants that were not as large as they could have been at the time I mulched them.

I didn’t mulch all the varieties I planted. I was testing the overwintering ability of some onion varieties new to me. I chose to use only two of the varieties in the wooly experiment, Walla Walla and Ailsa Craig. I had so many of them I felt I could sacrifice them, and I have overwintered these varieties in the past with good result so I knew it would give me a read of some sort. The other varieties were on their own just to see if they could handle overwintering or not. (Two new varieties of unmulched onions did awesome.- but that’s for another report on onion varieties.)

Being small at mulching time made them hard to deal with. An then when the strong winds came the wool did blow around a bit and some blew over a few of the smaller ones and smuffocated them.

What I concluded so far:

The wool certainly did not harm the seedlings in any way, well, except for the wee ones that were smuffocated.

The soil under and beside the wool did not heave. Nice! Definitely a plus, the uncovered heaving soil was the demise of many of the little onion plants in the rest of the bed. The larger the onion the better the anchor and the less effect the constant heaving of our freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw winters, but even the well anchored larger onions get set back from having their roots disturbed.

The wool mulch kept weeds at bay, a big plus, a very big plus. If I find myself with lots and lots of wool, all the naked beds might have wool coats! The soil under the mulch was perfect, hardly looks like just wintered soil at all!

Within the individual varieties the wooly onions seem to be the healthiest.

Will I do it again?

Yeah, why not, it didn’t hurt them and I do think it actually helped.

Changes:

Get the onion seeds planted on time in August, the first two weeks.

Mulch later in the fall so the onions have plenty of time to be large enough that the mulch can be better manipulated around them.

Make everybody help me so that all the onion beds get done. (Stop laughing Dear Reader, I’m serious.)

Get an awesome machine that deals with dirty fleeces and turns them into little mulching tubes to go inbetween the rows of onions – I hear you laughing again Dear Reader, this time I’ll let you.

Expansion?

You bet! Now that I know that the wool doesn’t have some weird deleterious effect on plants, none of the onions baahed at me, I will use it to mulch most of my overwinter crops. I’m thinkin’ many overwinter crops are like me, if my feet are warm and toasty in woolies I’m good to go for a little bit longer.

Wool. It’s what every discerning crop wears next winter.

Categories: Garden Methods | 4 Comments

Propagating for Pleasure

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Lanny

Not all that gets propagate around here is for the dinner table and sustaining the body, sometimes it is just for sustaining the soul.

I used to be a huge house plant person. Even my dormitory room at college was draped with vines and hanging pots. (Yes, it is true, I wasted my parent’s money at college, but in my defense, they insisted.)

But then something happened to my houseplant love, the farm I think, it could have been children playing in the soil, anyway, now my claim to fame in the house plant department is about two plants. My Sansevieria and a yet to be identified plant I gave to my mom when my dad died (thirty years ago) which has been divided a few times since.

Oh and the asparagus fern I put in a terrarium a couple of years ago.

My house plants, much like my house work, suffers from a bit of benign neglect, but for some reason I still manage to keep everyone alive, even the people who live and visit here.

I noticed the other day when I gutted my bedroom for my lungs’ sake that my plants were in need of a little more attention than watering, so everyone took a trip to the Hippy Hot Hut for a little rejuvenation.

The Sansevieria has a rhizomatous root like irises and ginger. Very easy to divide. I use a good sharp knife, like my grafting knife, to cut in between growing points making sure there are small root hairs coming off each rhizome piece as well.

I wouldn’t normally split all the growing points up into their own pot, but I’m not sure when I will be getting back to tending to the houseplants so I’m just going to make the bother really worth while.

I will put a grouping of these Sansevierias back in my room, Sansevierias are known for their air purifying abilities, especially typical building construction toxins and I’m sure I still have a few of those since the remodel two years ago, heck, Dirt is in my room, so I know I do.

Now I just need to find a house plant that eats hay tidbits and dust and I’ll be good to go.

Instead I seem to have a house plant that I’m sure I’m not supposed to have according to the “experts”. It sometimes seems more like upholstery than upholstery for all the dust and hair it collects and holds onto. But I love it, I don’t know what it is, it gets dusty, it is more needy than the Sansevieria, but I still love it.

I brought it home from a day trip I made into the mountains right after my dad died. My midwife and friend knew that my family was hovering because of my new born baby and my status as a new mom crippled with the irresponsible-baby-of-the-family gene. She came and stole me for the day, so that I could do a little breathing and still be “safely” in the company of an intelligent person.

We went into the mountains and on our way home we stopped at a little nursery in Buckley. I talked the owner out of this plant, she had just propagated it and felt it hadn’t had enough time to properly recover, but I assured her that it would be okay with me.

A small lie, because I wanted to give it to my mom, and she was horrible with indoor plants. But I figured I could make sure she didn’t kill it.

My mom loved African violets, because they were a grocery store staple I think it never seemed like a bad thing to her that they died after awhile. Like poinsettias at Christmas, dead by St. Valentine’s; African violets for the spring, dead by summer.

Well she managed to keep her new plant alive and thriving until her own death thirteen years later at which time I took it home, under a parting threat from my brother-in-law not to kill it. Uh huh. Of course.

I have divided it before, not all divisions have survived some come off with too few roots But all of her surviving babies seem to be just fine. I should start handing some of the offspring around. I had intended to give each of my daughters one, even though the two youngest probably don’t remember the plant that was always on my mom’s dinning room table. And then I was going to make sure that my two sisters each received one as well.

I think I have just enough babies to do that now.

Categories: Garden Methods | 4 Comments

Lime Today For Tomorrow It Rains

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Lanny

Ow. I lifted a thousand pounds today. Not all at once! Don’t be crazy Dear Reader, I did it fifty pounds at a time.

After having the sheep pasture drug out real nice, with spring approaching, and the rain a comin’ it was time to apply lime.

Lime or calcium, sweetens acid soil, and yes siree the PNW has acid soil. We grow some great moss. So to grow some great grass we add lime to our soil.

The load of lime Bet and I ran up the big valley for yesterday (Wednesday). It was my great idea to load it from the truck into the tractor bucket so that I could take it out into the field and pour it into the cyclone seeder-fertilizer two at a time. The other idea was to have loaded it into the tractor wagon and have the Beast take it to the field. I figured one tractor, the Lil’ Orange Tractor, could do it all herself

I guess since it was my idea and I didn’t need any one to drive the Beast, it was up to me to get the bags, fifty pounds a piece, all ten of them into the bucket. (Dirt and I did two bags last evening right after I got home to make sure the cyclone worked) Once in the bucket and driven to the field, it was also up to me to get each bag hoicked up into the cyclone.

I did. And I’m done.

Categories: Farming | 5 Comments

Early Winter Blog Blip

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Lanny

So perhaps you noticed a recent, recent being a relative term of course, big blip in my blogging, none in December, one in January and a handful in February. There is always a ton of reasons for most events but I would have to say that there was one particular reason my late fall, early winter season seemed to go off its rails, which isn’t the same as being “off the hook”.

Note: I’m not going to edit the photos in this post in any manner, just raw, right off the card.

Back in late November Dirt and I were merrily ticking off projects. One of the projects we wanted to tick off, compost bins.

Now Dear Reader, you may think, hey a compost bin or two, easy peasy to get done right? Umm not so right. Compost around here is a whole ‘nuther thing.

We not only compost manure and vegetable waste, we also compost bodies. Animal bodies, and really only left overs of butchering days. The particulars of how that is done is for another post, for here today, several months late, suffice it to say, our compost piles are big, and so our bins need to be big.

We looked into making bins with what is called ecology blocks (cement trucks with left over cement pour the left overs into molds and wa-la you get a big huge chuck of concrete that can be stacked on another one and weighs a lot) You probably see bins like this Dear Reader, at your local landscape supply yard where you can get top soil for your garden or beauty bark (bark dust).

But alas, there is a slight economic gooseneck around here and not every idea can get out of the fermenting bottle. So… we decided to kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used that phrase… the word “kill” should be avoided here.

Any way we have a couple of very large cottonwood trees by the area where my piles are, where the bins will be. Some of them need to come down. They are huge, dense (mostly with water) and would make great bins. Okay not great. I already have bins made from cotton wood logs, they aren’t great, but they are cheap, free cheap, and I deal with the imperfections, somedays better than others.

If we cut it down before it leafs out I could also harvest all of the tips and extract the resin from them. I am in love with the hand salve that I made from the resin, I crave the smell of the dried tips. Definitely a good reason to cut the tree during late fall.

And a fir tree, which will be used for fire wood, needed to come down for my Market Garden to Market Shed Road. (A short road needs a long name.)

So the day to do the tree cutting came, well for me it came, for Dirt it was thrust upon him, that would be my part in the mistakes of the day. Dirt eyed the job and because so many things were on the job list he decided that some usual practices could be sidestepped because really, these two trees would come down easy, exactly where they needed to, Dirt’s first and most profound mistake of the day.

First the fir tree. Dirt made his strategical cuts, all was going well, down it came,

right on the fence. Ooops.

Well it only missed by that much (see thumb and index finger nearly touching). Nature isn’t the only one that takes out fence lines, hard to get too mad at the mind blowing storms.

But onward we go. On to the next tree. The cottonwood.

Dirt very carefully made all the correct cuts, checked and rechecked all the angles of the situation. To make sure it would go exactly where he wanted, while the tree was still connected by a cell wall or two, he took my Lil’ Orange Tractor and put the bucket on the tree to give her a push.

Holy moly it is going the wrong way! It starts leaning back as if it is going to fall right on the tractor, Dirt and all!!!

I am seein’ my widowhood flash before my eyes. Insurance claims, possible part time work, having to hire a handy man, lonely nights (okay, that’s what I thought of first).

Actually I kid around about this but boy howdy I was worried, yep worried, alternating with praying, and resigning myself to dealing with insurance forms if that was what God would have me deal with. And yes, I am still asking forgiveness months later for my lapse into worry. It nearly paralyzed me. Not a good thing to be, paralysed, around a tree waiting to fall. Not a good thing to be at any time, one of the many reasons God tells us not to. So I worked on it right then and there but man it was hard to keep my eyes and ears open for instruction and not whirling with intense panic. I could feel God helping me through the pull of that temptation. I certainly was asking with every breath for Him to keep me from the sin of panic

Our good friend and neighbor pulled in right at the moment after Dirt got done climbing said tree, yes, the very tree that was now hanging by one cell wall. He climbed it and the ladder next to it in order to attach the chains and cables he usually always uses when falling a tree (but on regular days he attaches them before cutting on the tree).

Bruce is elected to be on the Lil’ Orange Tractor while Dirt pulls the tree his direction with the Orange Beast.

Great, now my good friend, Terry’s, widowhood is flashing before my eyes as well, mmmm she seemed to be handling it way better than I was.

Within seconds the tree gets the clue that it cannot fall on the Lil’ Orange Tractor, Bruce, nor the electric lines. HipHipHooray.

Bye Bruce, thanks. He had only come over to pick up a package not spend and afternoon dodging trees.

So that is one of the stumbling blocks to early winter writing for me. Not so much this event, but the lessons it ushered in.

Most of the time I have a running conversation with my Creator. I often feel the nudges this way and that from the Holy Spirit, being pulled up short on this or that, having something slowly come to illumination. On the other hand, only a few times in my life have I had major, clear, fast and hot lessons come my way. This was one of them. And it has tentacles, quite a few. It seemed to kick off a winter of lessons, hard to swallow lessons. Hard. But ever so necessary.

I know I have trouble with schedules, there is always something to knock me off a routine. Dirt says it is mostly my own distracted brain, but any way, I hope that at least once a week I can write a bit on this until I’ve finished fleshing out the lesson I hope I have learned this winter.

It began with a big lesson on worry and panic, something I thought I had worked through over seven years ago. Never say you’re done with anything I suppose, so let’s call it a relesson eh? A relesson with a twist. That will be what I’ll file the posts on this under, “worry and panic” under “Spiritual Disciplines”. Worry and Panic, big ugly sins indeed, more of a root of evil than money. Behaviours and attitudes that sit in the lap of Self for sure.

So much for timed publishing, this was supposed to go up on Tuesday.

Categories: Spiritual Disciplines, Worry & Panic | 5 Comments

Sunday Not-Work Work

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Lanny

Oh my, what a day yesterday! I wanted to work on the neglected back yard a bit. It will soon be summer and the backyard and other purely ornamental areas will be in nearly irredeemable disarray. (Yes, for some places in the yard and house summer gets here in a flash, if I’m not careful.) So to begin a weekly little ritual in hopes to stay on top of the “sittin’ yards”, Sunday is to putter in them.

First thing to tackle, remember the storm photos of the ol’ cherry tree? The tree wasn’t broken, it fell over, shoving roots down on one side and bringing them up on the other, only not as bad as some uprooted trees like fir trees. But there would soon be a bigger mess to handle and a bigger mess to look at if we wait until summer to get to it.

So I talked Dirt into joining me in my undertaking. At first he was not happy, he doesn’t suffer ADD like I do, and his mind was on getting back out and finishing up the work he started Saturday, how noble. But he acquiesced, mostly cuz I threatened to go get my own chain saw (I used to have my own chain saw. I know how to run one but mostly I just leave the sawing to Dirt and so my chain saw didn’t get replaced when it died).

The plan was to leave a tall stump of the Ol’ Cherry tree. I had a silver vine climbing in the tree, I had separated a good chunk of it several weeks ago and was thinking of having an archway spanning from the old stump to the gate into the duck pasture to support it.

The weight of the upper limbs was amazing! Some of the cuts that Dirt made made the tree crack and groan and crack some more. Dirt thought that when he cut away the top of the tree that the stump would stand back up. It didn’t.

We figured that the Lil’ Orange Tractor could shove it back up straight. Before the tractor could come down and right the stump the rest of the trunk and big branches needed to be cut up and prepped for becoming fire wood or smoker wood. While Dirt did that I worked on some of the other flower beds while I secretly watched and made sure he was thinking about his cuts and not in a mindless hurry because I had asked him to do something other than what he had planned for his day. (Significance of that statement will be revealed in tomorrow’s post.)

Right when he was about to slice up one big trunk piece, I reminded him that he wanted to use a big wood plank for my counter top in the Market Shed.

Instead of cutting it up I went and got the tractor and we hauled it up to the garage until we decide how it will become a plank (by Dirt or a local saw mill). It needed to be out of the way and out of the fray of firewood production.

Where was Bet during all this work..?

Where do you think she is? I’ll reveal her location later in the post if you haven’t figured it out.

Back to what Dirt and I were doing.

I really thought that I needed the trunk to go back into place. When it fell over it disrupted a lot of soil, I could see that I had already lost some of my bulbs, when I tried to retrieve them I couldn’t get in between the roots. In that exercise I could see that there were big open pockets where the soil will just keep on falling into. Gardening nightmare! Okay, maybe not nightmare, just a severely bad dream.

And if you can see the little baby trunk here at the bottom left of the picture, that is one of two of the little cherry trees that will take the place of the ol’ cherry tree, he needed to have soil nice and tight around his poor violated roots.

Dirt continued to slice up the trunk and limbs until we could bring the Lil’ tractor around to push the trunk back into place.

Uh Ya. No.

So Dirt figured the Orange Beast would take care of it. So the Beast came into the backyard, backed up to Cherry Hill Garden, the chain wrapped ‘round the middle of the stump, he pulled with the Beast while I shoved with the Lil’. And still nothin’.

Sorry we don’t have more pictures of the ordeal. It was just Dirt and I,

Bet was elsewhere… Can you figure out where she is? Any way, with just the two of us I needed to do more than sit on the tractor and take pictures. Occasionally I got off the slowly sinking tractor to take a ‘nuther look at the situation, moved chain, moved branches…

But finally we gave up. Now with the ground below Cherry Hill Garden totally tore up, two large divots in Cherry Lawn caused by the Beast, even though Dirt put boards under the tires, the stump barely budged. Whoda thunk it!

Dirt moved the Beast out of the backyard and then moved on. On to other more pleasurable jobs. Did I mention that the weather yesterday was amazing? Half way through our work I was whining for a Coke (I completely love Coke on a sunny nearly spring day while I am working hard in the garden). It was a motersickle sorta day.

Even though the rest of the week did not look motersickle friendly, it was necessary to make sure the ride was ready for spring, including washing off the winter dust. Very important.

So I was left to my own devises.

Oooh maybe that was a bad thing I drove the Lil’ many times in and out of the back yard, perhaps too many times. Multiple tire tracks were there still this afternoon.

Before Dirt abandoned me he cut off the remaining trunk. (In the photo he is cutting off where the original trunk branched.) Which! made a great new candidate for the slab counter top. So after I was abandoned and trying to get the roots of the ol’ stump and the new little babies covered, I also needed to get that log up to where it would be safe, or at least it needed to be moved before August, which I figured might be the next time Dirt would be workin’ on the backyard.

I pretty much got this baby into the bucket, okay Dirt helped a little on the final roll when I hollered out to him. Me and Lil’ Orange hauled it to the saw pile.

I worked on the area, widening a pathway and using the soil to fill in the holes in around the remaining stump.

Now we have a remaining, nearly mossy, stump for a remembrance of the the Ol’ Cherry Tree, that provided us with numerous cherry pies, lunches on the lawn in its shade and a couple of weddings beneath its giant verdant branches.

More settling needs to happen, the rain is helping with that today, but for the most part my work is done, save for the bulbs I did save from the nether lands to plant and some other little things to be planted and more sculpting on the path and adjacent beds.

Which, alone or with friends will be where I work again next Sunday, barring any urgent needs somewhere else on the farm.

I’m trying very hard to make sure nothing is forgotten that needn’t be forgotten, so I hope that I can make it back here next Sunday.

Today Bet and I were attending to “crops” in the hoop house, high tunnel, in the Market Garden.

Lettuces, radiccio, and spinach went into some lovely warm ish soil under the cover of a high tunnel.

Tomorrow, oh who knows, I hate to say what I will be doing because not only do I always run under my own ADD but we also are under the gun of lambing season still.

But I do need at sometime this week to go north to the greenhouse supplier and the fertilizer (organic of course) man. The weatherman is predicting stellar weather later on in the week, and fairly nice by day after tomorrow, so weather wise, I would much rather be in the car in the rain tomorrow than missing being on the farm in the sun. No, I don’t like running errands in the rain, but I love being home when it is sunny, I always have work but the work without rain and the raingear always goes so much slower, time in town, seems to be the same no matter the weather.

Oh where was Bet this last Sunday?

Did you figure it out?

She was pruning trees. I love to have all of us working on the same thing but sometimes lots of stuff needs to get done and not necessarily by six hands at the same time. Yes, “many hands make light work” but the same is true of “divide and conquer”.

Thanks for stopping by for the weekend wrap up Dear Reader, I sure hope your weekend was as fun and productive as ours here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens.

Categories: Change, Farm Make Over, To Do List | 8 Comments

Saturday Work

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Lanny

We’ve begun to slowly chip away at the mess of down trees that this winter’s freak ice storm brought us. What a job, I’m thinkin’ that we have a lot of things on our to do list for the year that will be carried over to next year because of the unexpected work we were handed.

I find it amazing that the old tractor and wagon still keep on puttin’ out for us here at the Farm. The wood in the wagon is red alder, the saw cuts are white when Dirt makes them, see in the photo above just how white, then the cuts quickly oxidize and turn very red.

Dirt ran the chain saw and axe, I hoicked split wood into the wagon and began making burn piles. I think the bulk of our spring and summer “free time” will be making brush piles and cleaning up debris in the wood lots …and pastures

After lunch Dirt did other things will I sat on the tractor and drug the back pasture or sheep pasture. Most of the sheep are in the barn with their lambs, there are a few left out here but they are corralled inside the electro-net in the corner, so I was able to do the majority of the pasture, save the edges covered by downed trees.

Dragging the pasture serves two purposes, it spreads the manure and roughs up the turf a little. It doesn’t make for a perfect application of manure (nitrogen and other nutrients for the pasture plants) but it is a fairly good approximation and saves much labor and fuel from the alternative, picking up the manure daily, storing it and then spreading it out of the back of a uni-tasking wagon called a manure spreader.

Roughing up the turf stimulates growth and allows nutrients get down into the root zone. In the next week or so I will pass over this pasture with a pelletized lime and a mineral salt, Sea90, more on that later.

And for us, on this particular pasture, dragging knocks down mole hills. Most of the big brown smears in the pictures where the drag has gone over are mole hills not manure.

What is it that is drug, why a drag of course. This one is a bit old, missing a few links but it works. It is wicked heavy in spite of its lacey look. And the pasture, definitely not as smooth as it looks, its bumpy and lumpy. Sitting on the back of the tractor isn’t as restful as one might think.

I didn’t expect to be able to get the whole pasture done (all that I could access) but I did, just in time for the working light to leave the sky. I headed in pleased that one more item off the to do list.

Categories: Farming | 9 Comments

Kai, Aksel and Ruby

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lanny

So lambing hell week had a major offset. We had Kai, our oldest grandboy, Aksel, his brother, and Ruby, their sweet baby cousin girl, out over that weekend (this very last weekend hardly qualified as a weekend, Dirt worked for the school for both days, last Monday being a holiday on top of that, and I am lost calendar wise).

The boys, Kai and Aksel, came out on Thursday, cuz dad took mom to Portland to visit old friends for her birthday. They had a great time tagging along behind Auntie Bet, tuckers some folks out.

When our oldest daughter, their mama, brought them out to us and walked into our kitchen, she turned green at the smell of our chicken broth cooking on the stove, dead give away for the call that she would give Aksel the next day announcing that they had taken a test and it showed that mom and dad would be adding another Manley to the crowd. Yippeee! Kai looked very excited, not too surprised, but very excited to hear the news on the phone.

Ruby came out with Justin and Anna early Saturday morning, while her mom and dad went to the mountains for the day with a bunch of teenagers. It had its rocky parts, a fairly new baby without her momma, but we all worked through it, well mostly Anna worked through it.

Ruby wore her legg toasters that I made her so we had to try on her matching hat. It’s a bit big so I will be making her a new one, and she will love it even when she sits in her car seat. (She has issues with cap type hats when seated in her car seat. But I’m thinking the bonnet type hat will be better and less likely to go over her eyes.)

It was a great Saturday and ended with our entire little family all together for some of Dirt’s slow bbq’d beef and cole slaw from the garden. It was nice just before the bad week began the next day.

Categories: Building A Future, Change, Daughters, Grandgirls, Grandsons | 7 Comments

Tides A Turnin’

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Lanny

It was a tough week last week.

The hard week started last Sunday. And the story in a second, but first a note…

Sorry I left you with such a dismal post for so long, I will try to refrain from exposing my psychosis, well at least I won’t keep it up front for nearly two weeks anyway.

First off Dear Reader, you will never be dropped from my Reader because it is for you I have a now tidy Reader minus all the unnecessary news feeds and blogs that aren’t by real people that were mistakenly added.

The stuff that has been buggin’ me of late, that I can’t seem to get my sorry self over? Pessimistic panickers. I’ve spoken, written, on this before, usually a bit of pessimism thrown at me serves to throw me into overdrive towards accomplishment.

However lately I must be hormonal, like for two years straight, because instead of ultimately laughing it off and saying, “you really think so?” I have been wanting to be very very surly in my retorts. I should just sit and eat a torte instead.

The other thing that I seem to not get over in a very nice manner at all, panicky people. I don’t mean the “some one just dropped a bomb on the city and every one is running” panic, but just good ol’ every day hand wringing. “The world is going to end because the neighbor painted their house,” type panic. Good ol’ fashioned worrying, about things that are none of our business, about things that are not in our control, about things that might not happen any way, worrying about things that are just… well, things. I have always had a hard time listening to hand-wringing without poor effect, but lately I’ve become intolerable to hearing hand wringing, if by intolerable I can mean nearly brutally nasty about it.

But amid the hard quiet work that we’ve been doing this week God has been workin’ on me. Ouch. Mostly a paraphrase of a piece of scripture I know is there: I, Lanny P., don’t know crap. Nothin’. So a closed mouth and a kind face to all is what I should be concerning myself with.

So in earnest I will be working on my mood, and taking my vitamin D regularly instead of waiting until I want to pick up the radio and dash it across the room. My anger, frustration, irritation is no less a disappointment to my Creator than another’s worry. My red face or their red hands, pretty much the same thing.

So now to the fun stuff. Work. And yes, I do believe to the very tips of my toes, Dear Reader, that work is fun. Even hard, muddy, no fruition, asthma producing work.

So we had lambing hell week right after Timmy arrived. He is doing fine by the way, big and strong. Last Saturday (18th) we had an ewe prolapse, Dirt shoved her stuff back in, he and Bet talked about the feeding routine, cutting back on the evening hay (hay takes up a lot of room inside) and it seemed like things were okay, just watching and waiting for more lambs to join Timmy.

The next morning, the ewe that prolapsed had a bag hanging (part of the amniotic sac will often present itself in the early stages of a ewe’s labor) but she was just eating and pretending as if all was normal. Sometimes hay and grain will entice an ewe to forget for a minute or two what is going on at the other end, that is why we placed this one on the other side of the fence where there was only grass, usually the grass isn’t enough to keep them from laboring, not so with this one, so we were going to give her a few minutes.

Farther out in the pasture another ewe was laboring right where Timmy was born.

First lamb out with a little help from Dirt, super big, but no problems, we all (Anna included, her and Justin were down for the weekend) stood around waiting and watching, and occasionally looking over to where the other ewe that should have been in labor was, just wandering around eating. The ewe kept tidying and nudging the lamb, that’s her job, and then suddenly backed up, had a contraction, and out came…something, to which I exclaimed, “What the heck was that?!”

Sure ‘nuff, it was a barely formed lamb. Ugh, I hate it when that happens.

And still nothing from the other ewe. After we did a bunch of other things around the farm and set Justin and Anna on their way home, we continued to watch the ewe that was determined to ignore the elephant in the room, or the lamb that would like to come out.

Finally enough was enough, and Dirt went in aggressively after the ewe proceeded to prolapse again. What he felt was a misaligned lamb, and huge. But eventually Dirt was able to get it out, stillborn. The ewe was up again, eating, and pretending as if everything was normal. Dirt let some time pass as she didn’t seem to be doing anything more than normal when a ewe has a single birth.

But no placenta came. More time, nothing but somewhat odd behavior, so in Dirt went again, up to his arm pit, way back inside her, a sideways lamb. Dirt worked for hours to turn it. And hold on to your queasy stomachs, it did not smell right, it had that sweet puke smell. Once it was out the reason for the smell was evident, the second lamb had been dead for a few days evident by the lack of hair and hooves. No one survived that birth.

Now we had a dead ewe and only two lambs from three births, not good percentages. Sheep folks like to have a 200% lamb crop, that means two live lambs from each breedable ewe. It is a hard target to hit when you have yearlings in the herd, they usually throw singles. But sometimes a set of triplets or two will balance that out and it turns out to be a stellar year. A 150% lamb crop on the ground (born) or there abouts is nice, doable on the pocket book if everything else goes well (feed prices, haying success, good growing season). A 100% lamb crop, not so great but a heck of a lot better than a 67% lamb crop. Which was where we were at the beginning of last week. Three lambs from four births. Not good and from disturbing, disheartening events.

But now our numbers are up. Things turned around with a couple of easy births and a couple sets of twins. So for now we sit at 112.5%, hopefully we don’t slip down from here and prayin’ we go up a little.

And it will be nice to be at the end. If my count is right, six more ewes to go, there is a ewe out there that has yet to lamb for us, our ram evidently doesn’t like tails, so she lambs or goes to the auction this year, but we did keep her two years past logical and one year past hopeful, so she is included in the count nonetheless.

Ultimately the count isn’t final until the fall. So after the tolls of conception, gestation and birth, there is still coyotes, eagles, neighbor dogs and disease to get past. Ahh the challenge of small farming, wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Like Bet said even after a grueling week and in between hard to pull live twins, “I just love little lamby faces.”

Categories: God the Father Son and Holy Spirit, Lambing | 7 Comments

I Wanna be a Hermit When I Grow Up

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Lanny

I promised a picture of the new lamb today. He has been named Tim. Aksel christened him.

And now a little wry humor, or a little humor gone a wry….

I used to be a rock solid extrovert. Undeniable. Off the charts. By everyone who even remotely knew me and even myself, though it was constantly impressed upon me by those in my life who are pressible, that really, a good person, a worthwhile person, is an introvert person. And I would have to agree, the introverts around me sure as heck got in a lot less trouble than I.

But over the years after many failed attempts at being a lady-like person, trying my darnedest to not talk personally to complete strangers in random lines, sneeze loudly, guffaw at the jokes that would cause others to only smile politely, spit out the most random, opinionated, ridiculous things at the most inappropriate moments, after giving up on getting that type of behavior under control, I decided to embrace it, and so lived the rest of my adult life in only mild midnight-reflective embarrassment of myself.

But now in the last year, and a bit, I’ve come to realize that something drastic has come over me. At first I thought I was just a bit tired from two rather whirl-windish years of great changes. But in reality the biggest change that came out of the last few years? Is me changing from being an extrovert to waking up one day as an introvert.

I’ve taken several personality test to make sure, an’ sure enough, even after trying to cheat, it is confirmed, I am a diagnosed introvert. Golly, now I become what my mother wished she could make me, just a few years too late for her enjoyment, and too late to have spared me the loss of dignity several times over, not to mention a few friends and most likely even more relatives. And I fear that it is only getting worse, my changing personalities.

I year ago I noticed that I no longer had a desire to host the impromptu party, or a planned one for that matter. Now I dread feeling like I might have to.

All I can say is, this is weird. Sunday Dirt and I went on a wine tour of the south sound. I hated it.

I did enjoy having time with Dirt. And many of the wines. And I know many of you are saying, “Isn’t that why you go on a wine tour?” And yes, but the old me would have really gone to meet new people, talk to folks I’d most likely never talk to again. But instead the new me hated all but maybe two of the conversations I held with the winemakers or fellow tourers. Okay, maybe hate was too strong of a word here, well one I did hate, I even told Dirt that I needed to learn the art of ending a conversation nicely, but very quickly, before I feel I need to say, “you are a complete boob, and I find zero redeeming value of having a conversation with you.”

Funny, I only thought that was how I was feeling toward talk radio hosts and their crews. But no, apparently I’m feelin’ it toward 80% of the world’s population. There was a time when I thought any conversation was worth having, and anyone was worth meeting and chatting with as if we had known each other forever. Oh, I’m not saying that back in the day I didn’t call a boob-of-a-person a boob, for sure I did, but I never minded having a conversation with them, and I would definitely have invited said boob to a party, hey, the more the merrier is the more the merrier. Not so much no more. No parties, no boobs at parties.

Aside from that there are some other changes this change is bringing.

It has brought me to cleaning up my Google Reader. I was finally able to edit it and for it to stay edited of people I found I really had zero connection to, now my Reader is down to a manageable level, both in time to read and enjoying to read, ahhh, maybe I can get back to actually reading the blogs I want to because they aren’t getting lost underneath one-hundred I don’t want to get to.

It, this personality change, is bringing me to want to beg Dirt to keep the radio off. Permanently. The news itself is hard enough to take all on its own. But with the movie critic giving his psychoanalysis on the latest psycho in the news, as if he were qualified to give those sorts of pronouncements anywhere other than at some cocktail party or around the family dinner table over poorly prepared pizza? Oh but wait, why not? Earlier this year we got to listen to some stupid woman (same station) who could call local farmers a joke because they didn’t really farm and she should know because she grew up in Iowa, and for some reason found herself on the radio daily and that makes her an authority on who’s a real farmer? Turn the radio off Dirt. Please! And hopefully the local farmers will refuse to feed her.

I have heard that introverts aren’t really shy, and they don’t really hate mankind, they just like to take in and enjoy the people around them but not say anything. They aren’t necessarily exhausted to utter fatigue by the mere thought of people, just that they need a little time alone to recharge their batteries.

Maybe I’m not an introvert either.

I’m thinkin’ I just no longer fit under a nice polite euphemism. My sweet mom is probably still glad she isn’t here to see this.

Categories: Change, Humor Gone A Wry, Wine | 11 Comments

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