21. The Catch-22
I hate to peddle in 21st century cliches, here, but man: I am busy. There are never enough hours in the day to get anything completed. I find myself setting my alarm to 5, and even 4 AM to try and get ahead, to tread water at least, on the lists of “to-dos”, but it doesn’t work. I am always ignoring one thing to do another.
If I could magically not sleep for a week and work continuously through the night for seven days straight, I’d still not catch up. Truly, I don’t know how other farms do it (oh yeah, with help and machines…).
But rest assured, I’m not down about it. Just constantly working. My husband, ever the agitator, likes to tease me when he wakes up to find me at the computer, having already been working for hours before he even gets out of bed on days when I don’t work one of my jobs: “Oh, day off today? What are you going to do with all that free time?”
And he’s right to tease me. Before we started this venture, I assured him that I could make it work: I would find the time, no matter what. But he (as always) was right: I don’t have the time to commit myself to truly being successful on this farm. I’d have to drop one of my other two jobs to get more hours in the dirt, but we desperately need the money that farming is not yet producing.
Here’s the rub: I can’t produce effectively with so few hours to commit to it. Ah, the catch-22…
The farm produces, though, whether I actively encourage it to do so, or not: the chicks and geese are now one month old, and so big! I’m working on completing a chicken tractor big enough for 70 chick(en)s and 2 geese, so we can get a real pasture rotation going and get that dirt churned and pooped on, and transformed into soil. I’ve started fall crops to get into the ground in the next couple of weeks, if I can carve out a bunch of hours to transplant them. The tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers need trellised, so there’s another task that is being ignored presently, as do the blackberries and raspberries. And the weeding. Oh, the weeding. For crappy dirt, it sure grows a lot of weeds well. And volunteer soybeans from crops before we were here. We’re growing those like gang-busters. Oh, BSC 853, save me from my manual farming woes! (It’s only like, $4,000. Surely, one of you can just buy it for me because you’re nice, right? And you can be my first shareholder, and when things really take off, well, you’ll be sitting pretty…)
Okay, okay. Enough with my self-pity. I don’t even have kids! How parents work and raise kids well is beyond me, considering that I’m only raising dogs, chickens, geese, and TWO NEW KITTENS! Yes, no farm is complete without a couple of cats to act as mouse and rat murderers.
Meet and (talk about burying the lead, Megan): two handsome gentlemen who will hopefully grow to support this system as rodent controllers. With so many poultry, we’re bound to have an explosion in the rodent population without any interventions, and we JUST got the infestation taken care of in the house (or at least, I haven’t heard anyone scampering around at night, or witnessed little rice-sized turds in my utensil drawers—blech!)
So our farm family continues to grow, despite my complete lack of time. However, my hours are bound to be cut at the hardware store, since I’m seasonal, transitioning to part-time for the fall and winter when business slows down. We can only hope that the fall brings a bit more time for me to concentrate fully on farming (and those cute chicks will be egg machines by then, so I’ll need to prepare for 60+ eggs per day).
Okay, what you’ve been waiting for: cute pics of animals and plants.
L-R: Kittens (and look, that husband I keep talking about), unimpressed chicken (Nan) who is in active protest against the new farm dudes—going so far as to refuse to bed down in the coop where the kitties are being housed, pumpkin starts that will go into the ground this week, my first blackberries of the season (sour!), kale starts, the porch peppers are flowering, peanuts coming up, and the ubiquitous egg shot.