Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, Regeneration...

Walking in my boxers and cowboy boots, across the field to the coops tonight, I find myself reflecting, as I do on things, on the last few months.   I find myself in deep thought...What are we doing?  Feeling the earth, with bare finger tips.  Smelling the dirt, hearing the calls of the rooster to come to bed(yes they do that too).  Fresh smells of farm, wind thru the dried corn stalks, the crunch of the grass under my feet. A boy laying out in the field with his dog after his chores, eyes wide and staring up at the popcorn clouds drifting into twilight.

So many sounds and moments of birth and watching animals and plants grow, so many moments of life and death, cycles rotating thru everyday on the farm...

I get thoughtful the day before a animal processing day.  Tomorrow we will slaughter and butcher another group of birds.  These are our summer broilers.  They lived a good life.  Fed well everyday, shelter over their heads, moved onto fresh grass daily.  They could hunt and peck if they wanted to but mostly they just liked to eat and lay around.  I suppose after 8 weeks of me doing that Sharon would probably process me too.

It's not hard to process a bird. I say that because so many people ask, "how the murder went" or "how was the massacre" and it sort of bothers me, I don't enjoy or not enjoy the process.  I just do it, I believe strongly enough in knowing that my meat came from my yard, and not slaughtered in the USA then shipped to China to be processed and then shipped back...yes that happens. We give a deep reverence to their life and the knowing where they come from, what we fed them, and how they are treated.

We treat them as life, for that is what they are... Our life, our children's lives, our friends lives.  I thank each of them knowing their life gives us life.  Their life never really ends, it just continues infinitely, as does mine and yours. Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, Regeneration.

Summer flew by for us, our jobs went into full swing limiting farm pursuits. Now I'm off work for awhile again and trying to play catch up in a game that never ends.

Some things to update:

The wheat patch grew in and we got about one bushel of wheat.   Of course then we have to thresh and separate it still.  Of the three experiments only one grew to full harvestable size.  The pasture is a tough beast to tame.  It constantly eats up any ground I clear.  I pastured the meat birds over it after I cut it with the old ancestral scythe from Sharon's side of the family.  It is very eye opening to see how much work goes into hand harvesting a grain.

The corn grew in really nice, and we had what looked like was going to be a great patch of cauliflower and then not a single head came...it was weird!  Then the cabbage got eaten up and all nasty and rotten by something.

We had great success with tomatoes as usual, collard greens, kale, some beets, carrots.  These would have been even better if we had time to thin the rows and weed, but work was too many hours and the commutes a motivation sucker.




In June we went to the Mother Earth News conference and it was stellar!  I learned about Mushrooms and pasturing birds and all kinds of great things that have motivated us to get going on more seriously.  Our most recent endeavor has been plugging a bunch of oak with mushrooms spawn.  Next fall we will have mushrooms to add to the mix!  YAY! I love Shitakes, maitakes, oysters, and Lions mane! Decomposition to make life is cool.

The October addition to the farm will be pigs, and I think we already have all of the pigs sold that we haven't even bought yet!  Woohoo!

Life on the farm is good.  We enjoy being stewards to the land and all our critters, we enjoy providing friends and family with quality food.  Thank you for supporting us!