Farm Friday, June 24th, 2022
Happy Birthday, Mom!
This week my mom, Kathleen Myers has a birthday! Yay!
Precious (our llama who has been having trouble standing up) had a good week. She is getting into the groove of knowing when we are about to try to lift her up to standing, which we do three times a day. When we start approaching, she will often try to stand up on her own. Sometimes she succeeds, and other times we get there in time to help steady her as she mostly does it on her own. After she stands up, this week she has been walking around more and more confidently, before she sits back down. Also, sometimes when we enter the barn to help her stand up, we find that she has moved since the last time we were with her. We are thinking we might need a “llama” cam. This is all good news, but we don’t want to get our hopes up too much. The vet came on Wednesday, and he said she looks good and her anemia numbers are better. Fingers crossed.
This was a HOT week. We were over 90 degrees for a high temperature several days this week. Even though we got a tiny bit of rain on Monday night, it isn’t nearly enough for the crops. So we set up the sprinklers and have been moving them around every four hours. Little by little, we water everything, and then we start over. We set up drip irrigation in the two hoophouses and the tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers are appreciating the water.
The heat makes plants grow faster. We can see that some crops have doubled in size compared to last week. The three sisters garden is growing fast!
In the middle of the heat, we needed to load 150 bales of hay into our barn. To me, that is a defining moment every summer: the smell of new hay, itchy arms from handling bales, sweat dripping from my nose, dust in the haymow, and the sound of the hay elevator bringing the next bale up to be stacked.
It was the Summer Solstice, and we had a bonfire with the students who are here this week. We had a lot of scrap wood to burn up, including a few wooden baskets full of wood that we put on whole. When each basket burned, it was quite a spectacle.
This week we weeded the whole farm! It starts with using the tractor to get all the weeds that are between the rows, and then we have to use a hoe to get the weeds between the plants. The hot, dry days are great for killing weeds. I also used the tractor to mound soil against the potato plants. This helps the plants grow more potatoes but also smothers the weeds. Win, win.
This week has been AMAZING for fireflies. Every night they put on a light show. My phone’s camera cannot capture this magic, so you will have to imagine it.
In writing news, my Vocal story which imagined if our llama Precious was a dragon did not win or place in their “Fantasy Prologue” challenge. Oh well. I entered a story in their “Summer Meal” challenge. Since I joined Vocal to enter contests, I have also been re-working some of my Medium stories about genealogy for Vocal. This one earned me a bonus.
On Medium, I submitted my story about the Great Hunger (AKA Irish Potato Famine) to a new Medium publication called “Fuck Capitalism.” It blows my mind as I keep learning how f-ed up capitalism really is, and most of my stories have an f-capitalism subtext anyway, so why not?
