Farm Friday, March 31st, 2023
Visiting a llama farm, pruning apple trees, and collecting frozen sap
This week we took a day to drive an hour to visit a llama farm. The sisters on this farm raise llamas for young people to show in 4-H projects and they also show their llamas in competitions. These are exactly the types of llamas we will need on our farm. We want a llama who will be good with young people. We also need one who can guard our sheep. We met twenty or more lovely llamas, but they only have three for sale. So we took those three out for walks. It was a gorgeous day and we could be back there soon to pick up one or more animals to live with our sheep.
On Monday, we took some time to prune some of the fruit trees. It is a yearly task that needs to be done before the buds burst. Now is a perfect time. You can take off as much as a third of a tree every year without causing permanent damage. What is left behind will have room to grow, and the increased airflow around the branches will keep the tree from getting diseases.
It rained last night, and we lost some of the snow cover. The snow is still hanging on in the woods, and we are scheduled to get 5 more inches tonight.
We had some sap flow this week, but not much. It was still a little too cold, especially on our north-facing slope sugarbush. We collected today, and much of the sap in the bags was frozen. When we collect frozen sap, we can either throw away the ice or boil it. When maple sap freezes, the pure water part freezes first, because sugar is a natural anti-freeze. We could hypothetically throw away the ice, and cut our boiling time, but we don’t have many taps in this year and I want to get as much syrup as we can, so we are boiling it all.
We also started our tomato seeds for the year. I decided not to grow a lot of paste tomatoes because we always have enough other tomatoes and I forget to pick the paste tomatoes. We will still have 500 tomato plants, so don’t worry about us.
In writing news, since March 28th Laura M. Quainoo, Aunty Jean, and I have published our RaWBC book club reviews of Tim Wise’s Dear White America. I have spent a lot of time reading and responding to comments and revising my own essay along the way. It has been a week of self-reflection on my own identity as a white man and how my whiteness functions in an unequal and unjust society.
I appreciate that Laura, Jean, and I each wrote very different essays after reading the same book.
Laura and I have decided to change the way the RaWBC functions. Instead of choosing one book per month and dropping our essays on the 28th of that month, we decided to have no official choices or deadlines. Now, anyone who wants to can tag a book review with #RaWBC and invite others to read along and write their own essays. There will also be no monthly deadline. Just drop your reviews when you want to.
Let’s see how this goes.
I also wrote a short fiction piece after being on zoom for a whole-day workshop. We kept going in and out of breakout rooms. I had this vision of a sort of zoom maze where you could enter a breakout room and then find a link to another zoom room with has other breakout rooms and so on. It would be like a “choose-your-own-adventure” book or a Dungeons and Dragons game. In each zoom room or breakout room, there could be different challenges and riddles and quests and monsters. My attempt at a short story this week turned out to be only the beginning of a story. Stay tuned for more.
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