Road Signs of Life

Road Signs of Life

My fingers and heels have gorges and ravines that rival those of the Grand Canyon, and my knees snap, crackle and pop like a bowl of breakfast cereal, but still work just fine, thank you so much for inquiring.

I have worn out three pairs of sandals so far this year, because apparently they do not respond well to pitch-forking, but they’re cheap. And my backyard, known simply as the West-Forty, is planted to capacity with an array of flowers, herbs and vegetables.

West-Forty

These are all signs of great success.

I have caged 75 of my more-than-100 tomato plants, I have gotten the last of the up-planting done with the sixty pepper plants that went into the ground inside the greenhouse yesterday, and I have completed the set of nine rock steps I was building just outside my back door.

These are additional road-signs of life that indicate I am on the right track.

Now I am about to begin the monumental task of trellising the 25 cannabis plants we have growing in the back, a labor of genuine love that will consume me for the next two months. I am up for the challenge.

I cleaned the two outdoors refrigeration units, each a five-by-three-by-three feet chest-size, one a refrigerator and one a freezer, and Casey fired them up. They both run off of solar power and are essential for farm-use, and have been inactive over the winter because we did not have the CSA going.

Now I have ice cubes for my hat, even if the freezer does not keep ice cream firmly frozen. I’m not sure how it is that a freezer can change water into ice at a prodigiously quick rate, but can’t harden ice cream, even if given a three-day weekend to accomplish the chore.

It matters not, though, if I choose to make root beer floats, but the ice cubes for my hat are essential for eighties-plus heat.

Amber is back!

The big news on-farm is that Amber is back! After being in Ohio for much of the past three months, helping out her mom as she recovered from life-threatening illness, and relocating Robin to a new living arrangement, Amber has returned to rejoin us on-farm. 

We have missed her greatly but must also recognize that her absence is what pulled us tighter together as a community, than we have ever been before. With Casey laboring ceaselessly for appropriate cannabis regulation, and being off-farm far more than he would like, much of the burden of maintaining the farm-fires has fallen on the shoulders of Annie, Lito and me, and more recently, Robin.

We are doing pretty well as far as backups go. With the decision to vastly reduce staff from last summer, due to economic restrictions, there was some conjecture that we had taken on more than we could manage.

Oh, contraire!

With a little help from RoseMary a couple of days a week, and the newly-returned Angie for four-days-a-week this summer, we are in serious control.

It is a heady feeling. I have never had this much involvement with the day-to-day farm maintenance of anything other than cannabis and Annie’s little kitchen garden. The feeling of inclusion is a balmy salve indeed. Respect that is earned on the playing field, as it were, is infinitely more rewarding than that which is earned by right.

Even if I am not capable of accomplishing the deeds of a twenty-something person anymore, I can still do OK for an old dude. Besides, I don’t want to do too much.

Management might start expecting it of me on a regular basis.