Odds and Ends and Tidbits

I keep storing things up in my mind that I want to write about when there is a slow day...but that slow day hasn't happened yet! So I'm going to record some facts, observations, learnings and other tidbits that keep rolling around my mind. I've thought about some of things often enough that I'm worried that I may have actually written some of them after all, so I'm sorry for any repeated information or stories!

On several occasions since arriving at Waterpenny I've stopped to watch this goose couple fly over my head. They are usually flying back and forth between our fields and our pond. I've only seen the two of them frolicking around the farm, not a whole flock of them. It's reminded me (with a smile) that geese mate for life, right? So sweet to share the farm with these two lovebirds.

These are my thirteen-year-old boots. I've had them since high school. Got 'em to work at camp during the summers. In the last year or so my feet have grown a half size. My boots no longer fit. Weird, right? People say that sometimes happens when women get pregnant. Uh, I'm not pregnant. Anyway, we heard from the old interns that there is a "free room" at the county dump. I decided to send my old boots with Anika to the free room when she and Rachel dropped off our trash and recycling. When Anika and Rachel got back, Anika was carrying my boots. She decided to keep them for herself! I laughed, but was happy that they stayed in the family. I still see them everyday.

The main reason why we get the un-sell-ables of asparagus is because there are asparagus beetles that chew on the tips. They also lay eggs on the asparagus. You can see the little black eggs on the left side of this asparagus tip (click on the picture to make it bigger). I tried to get a picture of the beetle, but when you get close they stop, drop, and roll into the mulch below. Tricky little guys!

We got our first egg from the hens three days ago! We are 1 for 175! We have one hen laying one egg a day and are hoping that the other 174 catch on soon. If you're keeping track of numbers, we started with 235 hens, but that's because we hosted 60 of them until their owners could come pick them up. We are now down to the number that we will have for the season. Go, girls, go! Lay us some eggs!

I finally took my laundry off the line today. It has been there for three days while the rains have come and gone, drenching my clothes over and over again. Sigh. It rained again today, but I got my clothes off the line in time. When it rains we can't plant because we can't get the field ready. It compacts and is hard on the soil to drive over it with the tractor while it is wet, so we only plant on days when the ground has had a chance to air out. This week's weather has caused us to push back the planting schedule, but Eric said that the benefit is that we get to go back and care for the things that we planted earlier. Today we uncovered and weeded the flowers. They look great! We all remember planting the little, yellowed, scrawny things. These plants were affected by the greenhouse troubles earlier plus they experienced a few frosts since we planted them. Seems like they have almost all made it through and are getting established really well. We also uncovered and weeded the new spring kale. Since it loves the colder weather, it was pushing up against the row cover and exploding out of the holes in the row plastic! So exciting!

This reminds me of another thing. We have the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) starting in June. Eric and Rachel are having to make decisions about what to take to the weekly markets and what to stock pile for the first few CSA shares. Folks in this area and in the DC area buy a share in our farm at the beginning of the season to help us get everything bought and seeded; we then bring them a share of vegetables each week throughout the summer. We obviously have an obligation to these folks since they have already paid us a chunk of change directly up front. Eric told us that even though the spring kale was ready to start being harvested and sold at market, he is going to hold off and stock pile it for the CSA shares instead.

Did I write about the bees swarming? I was reading my book outside one day and thought a piece of machinery was coming around the corner because of the rumbling sound that was getting louder. When I looked up and saw hundreds (thousands?) of bees heading towards me I ran inside the house! I took a beekeeping class last year and learned that one reason why bees swarm is when they lose their queen. In general, it's usually a sign that something is wrong when bees swarm. I guess they were just getting adjusted, though, because they didn't swarm for too long, and it was shortly after the beekeeper dropped them off on our farm.

The Spring Peeper frogs stopped peeping a couple weeks ago. I had gotten used to falling asleep and waking to their sounds. I'm curious where they go? Or why they stop? Or if they got bigger? Now I hear the other frogs. I haven't seen one so I haven't been able to identify it yet, but it sounds like a single tinny banjo string being plucked. Doink. Doink.

When we had our team meeting with Eric today, he told us about how they lost several acres of vegetables in 2007 due to herbicidal hay that was sold to them as chemical free hay. He (and I both) got choked up when he talked about how several of his customers refused to take the refund because they said they joined the CSA to support the farmer, no matter what happened. Since I have been on the other side of a CSA as a customer, it was incredible to hear Eric's side of a bad experience as a farmer. He was touched by the support and connection with his customers. So for those of you who are a part of a CSA, hooray! And for those of you that aren't join if you are able!

On Tuesday of this week we drove to Clear Springs Creamery a couple hours away. We took a tour and learned about how they make 85 gallons a day of milk, chocolate milk, several flavors of drinkable yogurt, and several different kinds of cheeses from 40 cows. It's a small operation but they are loving it, despite quiting their jobs during a recession and never going back. The father got the land from his mother and it has been in the family for at least a hundred years he said. They sell at the Takoma Park market and a couple others.



We visited the Farm at Sunnyside again and had the official tour. Guess where the tour ended up? At the cherry trees! The trees are full of cherries, and they were delicious! I ate as many as I could and then was excited to see brownies with more cherries at the potluck. Yum!




I have flying ants in my shed now. Everywhere.



We have two pear trees in front of the intern house. They have baby pears on them right now, so again, we are eager for them to ripen! I wonder how long that will be?



I'm sure there are more tidbits that I am forgetting, but this at least gets a few of them off my mind...hopefully I won't forget and write about them again!

Oh, and I think I'm in love with this tree.
The End.

Mary's Rock

Just realized this post didn't post! It's from this past Sunday:

I woke up at 6:51am, two minutes later than my normal 6:49am wake up time. My internal clock has hit 6:49am on the nose for I don't know how many days. It's kinda weird. Anyway, I started the day a bit bummed. I rearranged my weekend and my days off because a friend of mine was supposed to come to the farm. It didn't end up working out, so all of my plans for the weekend dissolved. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and since I was the only one who had the day off, I had to do it alone. I've been doing a lot on my own since I've been here, and mostly I've reveled in it. I think I felt lonely at the start of today, though.

So what did I do? I headed to the strawberry patch below Rachel and Eric's deck. Rachel says they try to pick a little bit each day since they are all ripening now, so I've been meaning to head over there. I spent about 35 minutes in the patch and look what I found! I saved a couple handfuls for this week and then de-stemmed and froze the rest for later this summer.

Then I planted my moonflowers seeds from my aunts and my moneyplant seeds from my (mom's) friends.

Then I did laundry, had lunch and headed to the Shenandoahs. Since it was already afternoon by that time, I went on a five mile hike just barely inside the park boundary. I climbed Mary's Rock. Park lore says that Mary hiked this mountain and found two orphaned bear cubs at the top. So she carried them down the mountain, one under each arm. Here are some pictures from my day:

And a movie, too!


Hope that didn't make you sick, Mom.

Market in Charlottesville

It was an early, but beautiful morning. I awoke and drove with Eric to Charlottesville in the dark and bagged spinach as I watched the sun rise. I brought my camera to market again and forgot to take pictures again. Shucks. We had a decent market. There were a steady stream of customers, but not as busy as we were expecting for such a beautiful day. Sun, no wind, and in the 70s the whole time!

I fell asleep on the way home and am now trying to figure out if I should take a nap or stay awake until bedtime. This 3:45 am wake up time is messing with me!

Since I didn't have my camera, here are a few pictures of me harvesting kale before it got mowed down:

Lightning

Dancing fireflies
Awaiting bolts of lightning
Something's in the air

How Two Disasters Turned Out Okay

That's what Eric said as we were in the midst of re-planting the pepper field this morning. "See? Now you have witnessed how two disasters can sometimes turn out okay." He was referring to the same situation that we had in the tomato field last week. On Sunday, the weather got down below freezing again. 29 degrees, in fact. So we lost a lot of peppers, squash, and yes, the tomatoes we REplanted last week. Sigh. However, Eric had us replant with the greenhouse peppers that we likely won't be able to sell at market because of how the wintered soil turned them yellow. The yellowing of these plants was one disaster that is providing our fix for the frosty second disaster. And again, we are hoping for the best- that once these yellowed pepper plants get into the ground's good soil they will perk up and start thriving.

I also saw the effects of row cover! There were some plants that were (magically!) fine through the frost, but ONLY because they were covered with row cover. It kept them just warm and protected enough to survive the chilly, wet air. I guess that should make us grumble a little less when Eric asks us to go out and fix the row cover one more time before nightfall (because the wind blew it off the plants!

And have I mentioned that the first night of the chickens was also the night I spotted the first lightning bug of the year? And last night there were even more! I'm excited at the thought that the whole farm may be lit up by these beautiful things once they are in full force.

Come time for the lightning bugs to come out, I always tell my east coast friends that I didn't know that fireflies were real until I was in high school. Really! I just thought they were as real as a unicorn. I took a class trip to Philadelphia, though, in high school. No WAIT! That was in college?! Anyway, we were walking around in the summer time when I saw them. I stopped in my tracks in the middle of the sidewalk and just stared. They're real! I am still amazed by them, every time I see them. Just beautiful!

And what were we doing this morning before replanting the peppers? Weeding blueberries! As each crop comes in, each of us interns start to drool at the thought of it ripening. The berries are large on the bushes and just starting to turn from green to blue. Just barely. This is a picture of the blueberry plants when I first arrived on the farm. They are much more green and full (and weedy!) now.
Remember how excited I was by the asparagus? Well I keep trying to remind myself how special it is (and how much my parents love it!) so that I don't take it for granted. It's only supposed to last a couple more weeks, but we feel like we've had asparagus coming out our ears! Do you have to blanch it before you freeze it?

This afternoon we had some folks from Radical Roots and Appalachian Star farms come for a tour on our farm. We just finished our potluck together. I have to figure out how to taste everything at these potlucks with people who love to grow, cook and eat food...without getting a stomach ache from eating too much!

Oh, and last night I joined Sunnyside Farm interns for drinks and a light dinner at the Blue Rock Inn just up the road. The Inn has been closed for a year or two and just opened up a couple weeks ago under new management. We had to check it out. Here is a picture of us. Stacy, in the front on the left, worked here at Waterpenny for two seasons before heading over to Sunnyside Farm.It's been rainy and/or cold since Tuesday, so we've been weeding and working in the greenhouse a lot. Here is a foggy picture of my shed. Remember there's a mountain behind there?!Oh, and I don't know if I should say this too loudly, or too soon for that matter, but I think I kinda like weeding.

Heading out now to put the, ahem, slower chickens in the coop to roost. The majority of them were in the coop when we got there last night, so maybe even more have caught on by tonight. We shall see.

235 Girls

"Chickens!"

Yep, all 235 Highline hens are here. We got off of work half an hour early this evening so that we could come back together at dusk to teach the chickens to roost! Ha! It was so much fun. I'm sure that excitement will wear off as their excrement rubs in, but being my first night of hen handling, I had a ball! One by one, five of us rounded up all 235 of the girls and set them in the coop to sleep safely together, side by side. We tried to get ahold of them around their body and on the outside of their wings. Most of them were wanting to settle in for the night anyway, so they were pretty docile. I was amazed when most of them just let me pick them up! I thought they would try to peck my hands, but none of them fought me off. Well, a couple of them cried bloody murder, but I cooed at them and told them it was okay, and most of them settled down in my hands. Sweet little things.
I didn't bring my camera, so I'll have to post a picture of all of their little tail feathers lined up when we do it all again tomorrow night. Eric says it takes about a week or so for them to catch on to sleeping in the coop on their own. 175 of the girls are ours, and the other 60 belong to two other folks who will be picking them up later this week. We are all eagerly awaiting the arrival of the eggs. Feels like Easter all over again!
Ok, here are a couple more pictures:

The chickens are here!

And the sky is not falling yet! As I was preparing tea for breakfast this morning, I looked out the window to see the Chickenman working with Eric and Intern Rachel to get the chickens into the coop area. I coined it the Annual Chicken Toss because that's about what it looked like. The Chickenman told me that he is located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and that these are Highline chickens. Chickens seem to get a pretty bad rap. Everyone that I've talked to who has previously taken care of chickens seem to have consensus that they are, well, stupid. Aw! Poor things, just because Rachel and Eric had to work together to show them the other side of the pen where the feed and water were located? Got them all out from under the coop, Rachel?

And because the sky hasn't fallen for quite some time now, Eric decided to get the irrigation hoses rolled out all over the fields. I've noticed that we've had several days with rain clouds but no rain. Or the clouds will sprinkle a few drops and then roll on by. We have covering over most of the plants in the fields right now, so a sprinkle has a hard time penetrating the cover. The predictions say there's a hundred percent chance of rain this morning, though, so cross your fingers! And where are my RAIN PANTS?! :)

What else happened this week? Ah yes, the frost and the greenhouse. Well, we ended up losing a fair amount of tomatoes out in the field, and several more of them look sick. We spent one afternoon following Eric through the field as he laid out a new plants for us...more about that below. We pulled the dead ones right out of the ground (we planted those earlier!) and then re-planted the new ones. Sigh.

Here are four pictures from a couple days ago at the greenhouse - two of basil and two of tomatoes. They demonstrate the other problem that we have had with plants this year. We stored soil over the winter and it ended up going bad. You can see the stark difference between the two flats of plants that were planted at the same time, some in old soil and some in the new soil. A pretty remarkable difference if you ask me. As mentioned in a previous post, we flat-out composted many of these plants. However, we used some of the tomato plants above to replace the dead ones in the field. They don't have a lot going for them, but we're cheering them on anyway!

This past Sunday was my first time selling at the Takoma Park market. Eric called it a "doozy!" I was worried he meant a flop, but he just meant it was busy! And I concur. There were four of us working the stand and we seemed to have customers rolling up the entire time. I think I mentioned in a past post that at markets I suddenly get appointed to expert plant adviser and weather predictor! I have learned a lot but there is still much to study up on. Which flowers like shade? Which herbs will come back again next year? Can I trellis the cucumbers? My eggplant died last year...can you tell me why? Why does this melon plant's leaf curl like this? How many tomatoes am I going to get from this thing? How do you harvest arugula so that it keeps growing? Is it too late to plant lettuce? Which plants in my bag are companion plants and like to be planted next to each other? I have deer...what should I plant to keep them out of my garden? And the million dollar question: Is it too early to plant the basil/tomatoes?????

On my day off yesterday, I went for a bike ride. I explored some of the roads that run behind the farm. I had gone running on these roads, but hadn't made it as far as I wanted to before I had to turn back. I found a nice three mile loop that I can go running on, I think. Or I can see if I in fact achieve three miles (like I think I do) when I run for 30 to 40 minutes! The landscape out here is so intriguing to me because it is so different from the mountains of Colorado. It's what I imagine when people describe really old farming country, but it's different to be right in the heart of it. It's stunning really, the huge farm trees in the middle of pastures, abandoned barns alongside creeks, streets named Old Hollow Rd, and butterflies lining the roads.


My last stop on the bike ride was at Roy and Janet's Orchard. They have a convenience store with all of the basics and everything you could ever dream of that's pickled. Oh, and pints of local ice cream! The store is located around the corner from our farm, so every year the interns are regular customers. He has yet to remember any of our names or faces despite our frequent visits, but we're working on him. I forgot to ask him how long he has been on the land, but I did ask him what he was working on. He said he had "pushed up" several trees this morning so that he and his "help" could plant 150 more. They planted 165 last week. Here's a pic of Roy:It's raining! Alright! Looks like this one may stick around for a little while. Thank goodness.

The Gang

Well, as of this weekend, we've got our entire crew here for the summer. From left to right: Eric, Miranda, Andrew, Anika, Me, Rachel and Andy. Sarah is on the right and was here to help out with plant sale for one day. Aren't those Waterpenny shirts sharp?




Oh, and here is Rachel, Nicholas, and Isaac (and Anika) to round out the bunch of us making the farm run this year.


I didn't get a chance to mention in yesterday's post that Jen, my housemate from DC, stopped by the farm on the way home from Charlottesville. It has been a gift to have friends come out to visit the farm since I've been here. Jen and I walked around the farm and then headed to the swimming hole. Then we sent her home with a bag of spinach for the 1825ers. Miss you, ladies!


I found out that I had the entire day off today, so I had to figure out what to do with a day off that I wasn't ready for! I wrote some letters this morning and then went for a long run. I have been exploring each street in and around Sperryville by foot or by bike. There aren't many, but there are enough to keep me busy so far. I do the exploring when I am not able to borrow a car and head to the "mountains" to hike.

After my run I came home, ate some lunch, and then headed across the highway to explore Turkey Mountain. Turkey Mountain is on Cliff's land and is in the background of many of my pictures. Here, let's see if I can find a picture of it...Ok, there it is with Cliff's cows in front of it. Cliff said we could go explore all the trails whenever we want, so I took him up on it (and I've obviously taken him up on the swimming hole offer, too). The hike wasn't too eventful, other than at some point getting worried that I wouldn't make it home. The trails and old roads wander all over the mountain and the top is covered in trees, so it's hard to know where you are exactly on the mountain. Luckily my sense of direction was functioning properly today, and I went on a big loop around the top and side of it.

On my way back to Waterpenny I happened to see Cliff driving by. He stopped and asked all about my hike, trying to figure out where exactly I went. He thinks I may have meandered partly into his neighbor's property. I told him that I saw a bunch of hunting booths set up along the way and he said that if they are on his property, they're not supposed to be there. So we're going to hop on one of his 4-wheelers sometime soon and go see together. He didn't seem pleased at the prospect of these hunting booths.



While I was gone on my hike, Nicholas found a tiny turtle. Here's a picture of me holding the little guy. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him to smile for the photo shoot.



From time to time we hear a loud siren ringing through the hills. I think someone told me that there is a volunteer fire department here, so that is their signal for the volunteers to respond. I'm hearing the siren through the windows of my shed now. Reminds me of Holden days when the spiders would trip the same alarm night after night around 3am and we'd have to respond in several feet of snow...just in case. Safety first, right Fire Chief Al?

Goodnight!