A Sunday morning

First – a happy mothers’ day to all you moms out there!

Posts in this category will be summaries of days, mornings, etc. around the farm. When we were just reading other peoples’ small farm adventures, we found these sort of posts really helpful.

7am the sun wakes me up. Moist, cool, and a little gray.

Caffeinate self, read wild plant field guide in the early sun. Until it rains and I finish under a canopy.

Milk/feed/hay/mineral/water/etc the goats, wincing at the loud “BLA BLA BLA!” and “MEEHEHHEHHEHHEH!” of a mother doe and her kids asking to be reunited (older kids who are eating a lot of solid food are separated overnight so we can get some milk too). We have very patient…or possibly deaf…neighbors.

Make breakfast – fried bantam eggs; grits cooked with molasses, bacon fat, salt,butter, and raisins.

Supplement caffeination, check email.

It’s sunny out! Mess with fencing around the new pasture for about 20 minutes before it gets dark and starts to pour.

It’s raining out! Stop by the buried metal drum full of damp sand that protects our root veggies through the winter. Grab a few handfuls of carrots, dash home.

Start a pot of beef stew with the carrots and a dozen other things in it, make a batch of feta cheese, start a 5-gallon batch of experimental light ale bittered with the tender green growing tips of Douglas Fir trees instead of hops. It’s only midafternoon, warm and sunny now, and after all that brewing the keg of porter I made previously is beckoning…nah, I’ll crap out by 6pm if I do that.

Compose blog post about my day thus far. Include a redundant sentence mentioning that I composed the blog post, followed by another sentence that adds even less to the narrative – and which carries the implied threat of a semantic endless loop, like what you’d see if you pointed a video camera at its own monitor.

Ponder the possibility that blogging about the day’s work might be a subconscious mechanism to convince myself that the day has already been so productive that I can take a beer and a book down to the river, sit in the sun, and relax.

Stop idly philosophizing and get out there to plant the rest of the taters!