Saturday, May 20, 2017

Done

It was an exhausting semester, but we did finally got done, and a few days of relatively little to do, I find myself ready to write a farm blog post for the first time since lambs were born.

In the end I taught just shy of twenty-four credits, ran a committee to make a new degree, and served as Faculty Moderator. That all took more of my life, especially as the end-of-year deadlines loomed, than would leave time for very much farming, let alone blogging about farming. However, we also kept this place free of snow, of which there was quite a lot, a record year. We lambed seven fine lambs, butchered six roosters, and raised our own starts from seed.

Now I'm suffering from a surfeit of put-off chores and farm projects. When you're that busy, the tendency is to say, "OK, then, we'll do that bit after the end of the semester." But when the end of the semester comes, there can be a lot to do. I need a list just to keep track of my to-do lists.

But we are slowly forcing a system of reason upon all this unreasonableness.

There remains the small problem of getting the garden planted. The weather hasn't helped there, first too wet, the too hot. This weekend, forecast cool but dry, seems like it will be our best shot. The sheep got sheared. The piglets are to be collected today, and the first lambs delivered to their buyers.

But for every step forward, there's a slip back. The tractor is leaking coolant again. A farm truck is in advanced stages of dismemberment while we rebuild its front end after an accident earlier in the year. A dog fox seems to have taken the last hen from the clutch we hatched last year and may have taken others. We saw the culprit skulking around earlier, so we have some certainty who it was. The remainder are at risk. And a bad smell from the crawl space since the weather finally warmed may indicate what happened to Shenzhi cat, who went MIA during the height of the battle this spring. Or it may be some of the missing chickies. I'll have to find out, because the smell is coming up into the kitchen.

So, life is still a little crazy.

That may be all I can write for now. Photographs are a bit beyond my capabilities too. We'll recover, no doubt, after a week or too of working down those lists, and provide more details later in the summer.

In the meantime, it is late spring in Maine, the apple blossoms are out, and our kid can play on green grass. We can be happy, and that is what matters.