19. Three Months!

Hard to believe we’ve been here for only three months. In a way, I feel like we’ve always been here. Maybe my mind is too consumed with the daily workings around here to concentrate or feel sentimental about my life “before”.

I’m starting to feel like I’ve made a farm (rather than just talking about it and writing about it). By this time next year, it will be a thriving business, but right now, it’s baby steps. Produce is growing; hens are laying; I’ve got chicks and goslings in my brooder growing happily (hooray!), and I begin at the Madison Farmers Market on June 13th. We also made our first big farm purchase: a ride-on mower, which the Hubs has been happily jetting around on. We’ve mowed the lawn three times in one week. Once to cut the too-long grass, once to cut up the piles of too long grass left in the mower’s powerful wake, and once to make the lawn just a bit shorter. It’s too much fun!

Now, I get to work on the field, cleaning up the acres that are uncultivated. I wanted to cut the grasses and weeds that are growing, unfettered, and blocking out my cover crop of red clover. I’ve put four hours into it so far, and have mowed about two or three acres (I think). Only five more to go.

At least, I will only do the field mow once this year, maybe ever. After the cover crop begins its good work, and I get the new chicks out there into a solid rotation, plant the orchard, and the maple trees get going, I will probably only seed the field in its entirety one ore two more times with cover crop and forage over the next couple of years. By then, my hope is that I will have a solid pasture rotation established, the soil will be working on its way back from the brink, and I can keep my mowing work contained to the yard, alone.

I put sweet corn in, and am still in the process of re-seeding from our late frost two weeks ago. I’m behind, but that’s my own arbitrary self-pressure. I think a lot of farmers around here are feeling the pressure to “catch up”. Even my neighbor across the way, who has 500 acres he seeds with feed corn and soybeans, hasn’t planted yet.

All-in-all, it’s been an excellent three months, and I’m ready for three more: this transition from city to country is feeling pretty perfect. I feel at home, beginning each day on the porch watching the hens roam about, a hot coffee in my hand, and my journal in my lap, and I end each day the same way (except with a glass of wine substituting the coffee). I listen to the birds and have fun identifying them by call or plumage; I hear wild turkeys call to one another in the morning, and coyotes yowling in the evening. I love it here.