A year in the life of a small family farm in America: Good evening from the mountain

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Good evening from the mountain

Good evening from the mountain, today has been a house cleaning day, mainly the kitchen. I am looking at it as prep for moving into the new kitchen. Ah to be able to put all my cooking stuff away, no more living out of Rubbermaid boxes. I plan to hang up most of the pans on the walls, lids on a towel bar, it all sounds rather nice, now if I was not exhausted it would all be great.

I have fallen short on my week’s goals; the soap has again taken second place to other more pressing issues. Each time I start a project I most certainly plan to finish it, but life has a way of changing my plans. When it is not an animal related issue, it is quite often one regarding the weather. The climate change has certainly taken its toll on our small farm. I have killed all but one Italian squash, honestly I feel like a murderer. They drown and rotted, and there was not one thing I could do to prevent it. I have managed to keep over half of the tomatoes I planted alive, but other plants have died in their wake. What a hard year it has been already.

I am just shy of 9 days from the Country Fair and needless to say I am less than enthusiastic about it all. I have not finished all the canning, nor did I register the chickens. I just forgot, and now I am quite sure it will take a miracle to fix it, and I will have disappointed the boys who have been eager to show their birds. Every year one of them takes first place, and that is so important to little ones. Aside from that if they do not let me enter them late; I am stuck with nearly ten more birds. I will call in the morning and grovel in hopes of a reprieve from the fate I have laid out before myself.

Other than these trifles of life, I have gotten some more puppy photos for you all and a couple of pictures of the kimchi before I set it to cure. The kimchi sits and calmly cures, but the pups, that is a different story altogether. They keep me on my toes, constantly escaping the next only to be found under the dresser or piled in the middle of my floor. I am only made an aware of these things when the mother whelps as if she is unable to bring them back to the nest, or the pups whimper in need of help. She will not pick them up, my fault I guess, before the pups were born, I had issues with her picking up the kittens. I did not like the whole idea and made my point quite loudly, and I see now she will not pick her pups up, either that or she has me better trained than I her. As I am now a dog slave getting up many times a night to help her with her pups. I know it all sounds funny, but it is not as funny as all that.