It's Only Going to Get Busier

It was a wonderful week spent with my friend Beth.  She got along with the animals, except the Ram that I named Noodles cuz he keeps on Ramen me.  Beth also took lots of cool photos of various things posted on facebook.  Check it out!  She is a great photographer so check out some of her other albums as well.

This past week has involved discing and harrowing soil to prepare beds for the potatoes, winter squash, and onions.  I drove Millie and Karl(?) to do that.  Karl is out of shape and it was a hot day for once so he sweated up a storm.  Karl actually sweat so much that Millie was licking him for moisture and salt.  Sexxxy.  On a related note, the horses and sheep look much, much better after being put out on pasture.

One of these days I will take a picture of the pasture and how we graze them.  It's cool setting up fences and making daily decisions about how much pasture we will give them in order to graze the grass efficiently and evenly while not sacrificing the animals' nutrition.  Talk about intensive management.  Try managing how much an animal eats!

Other work included seeding tons of winter squash by hand and hand-transplanting about 50 trays of onions (about 30,000 individual onion plants).  It took the work of up to 4 people at a time over 3 days to finish the transplanting.  I did a quick calculation and it came out to around 50 hours of labor.  It would have been much longer if we hadn't used this system that Jeff found in a 1930's USDA publication about transplanting onions.  Basically we laid the seedlings in trenches made by a wheel hoe plow and plowed the soil back into the trenches after they were laid down.  As Jeff sang, "Wheel Hoe Power!"

Pow!

Well, that's all she wrote for now.  I must be off to knit for a special someone who is coming to visit for a week in Maine this coming Thursday.  Real men knit.