useless primate.

If you ever want to feel like a totally useless primate you should try transplanting baby onions on the back of a tractor at 4” spacing. Or maybe it’s just me… Everyone else here seems to be managing – and I do, too…for the first 3 feet until I get slightly behind and end up tossing small handfuls of bulbs out onto the field so that I can plant them by hand when we “walk the beds”.  I can’t even count the number of times our tasks here have reminded me of my former yoga instructor’s constant reminder to have patience with ourselves: “Simple, but not easy.”  

This is the transplanter - we sit on those seats and lean over to plant between the "shoe" and the wheels: 

Just about everything we’ve done so far at the farm has been simple in concept: plant 1-2 tomato seeds per cell of a 273 cell flat.  Got it. No problem.  Oh, wait. The seeds stick in clumps of four or five seeds, blow off in a sudden breeze, fall into an adjacent cell…and it takes approximately one gazillion times longer to seed a flat of tomatoes than you think it ought to.  Or, hey, let’s lay this strip of fabric onto the broccoli bed to protect the plants as they grow. Sure!  No big deal. Oh, but wait…the wind is blowing, and when you weight down the edges it has to be up on the bed, but just the edge so that there’s excess fabric to allow the plants to grow quite tall, but enough of the edge so that the fabric doesn’t flap around.  Right.  Makes sense. But good lord the first attempts make me feel totally incompetent.  And generally by the time I start feeling like I’ve got the hang of it we’re on to something else.

It’s kind of strange to be spending the entire day every day doing things I’ve never really done before – at least it’s been a long time since that’s been the norm.  …Planting seeds, using vacuum seeders, stacking bricks, applying ointment to Olive’s eyeball, taping up holes in the greenhouse, transplanting from the back of a tractor, driving a stick shift, mixing soil, translating words like fish emulsifier and “whatdoyoucallthatflatblackplasticthingwiththedirtinit?” into Spanish, wheeling under cars to look at the uncovered underside of a diesel car engine (still not 100% sure of exactly what I was looking at…and, no, I still don’t trust that the jack will keep the car from falling and crushing my ribcage…)… 

Though I get frustrated with my lack of fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, I’m still loving the work.  The broccoli is planted and half the onions and scallions. 

That little broccoli got snapped, I see...but hopefully it'll pull through.  Eek.

The greenhouse and another hoophouse are totally packed with every shade of green – so cheerful!  The constant chilly rain and wind makes the greenhouse sound like we’re in the midst of a hurricane, and makes the warm, moist air feel cozy…and I can’t help but feel excited knowing all this rain really is going to bring forth some pretty magical stuff from the ground in the coming weeks and months.  Between that and good food and good people, I’m feeling pretty fabulous.      

I’m also in good spirits because I spent most of Saturday reading the Tao of Pooh, Charlotte’s Web (<3), and Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower…which got me all pumped up about my someday-operation.  Oh, and Juan’s wife had a baby. A little girl named Celimar.  So lovely. He was glowing when he heard. We all went to Target last night to put a gift package together for the little one and his wife.  I wish he could fly home for the week to meet her…I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for him to be so far away… He showed us his pictures from Peru last night - of family and the fields and mountains and the Institute where he took his organic farming courses.  Pretty rough terrain.  :/  

It's snowing this morning, so we're going to have another late start.  We got off early yesterday because the weather was pretty bad and we'd run out of greenhouse stuff...I even got to spend a couple hours doing data entry on their membership database.  I wouldn't mind doing that again today. Typing is kind of fun when you don't have to do it all day every day. :P

Week 2 - Potatoes

Whew. This week was a lot of greenhouse work - planting more tomatoes, herbs, and eggplants, transplating tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and who knows what else...organizing the greenhouses, setting up more tables, watering...watering...watering...filling up the cold frame, cleaning the packing shed, and then... chopping potatoes. We chopped a crap ton of potatoes.

And then we planted them...following a short demonstration on the #1 way a tractor can kill you. Farmer Paul says he will be sharing the rest of them later on, but this was the first and perhaps easiest way: the PTO.  

He also warned us about hydraulic fluid.  Two more ways I do not want to die. Yikes. So anyways, two planters have to kneel on the machine attached to the back of the tractor with a bin of chopped potatoes between them. As the tractor goes forward, the planters line handfulls of potatoes on one side of a small conveyer belt that drops the chunks somewhat evenly into the freshly plowed row, and then the back blades turn the soil back over them. Very cool. Somewhat stressful when you're the one getting the potatoes onto the belt. Even though the tractor is creeping along, the belt moves quickly, and unevenly chunked potatoes aren't the most grab-able of objects. 

The other interns are great and we're all getting along really well. Such a contrast from my last few months in New Mexico... Everyone's up by about 7 and we sit chatting over coffee and granola for a half hour before morning meeting, talk about everything all day long, then sit in the living room until 9:45 every night playing the assortment of guitars/banjo/melodica/harmonica/spoons/pots&pans etc.   Good people with a lot of overlapping and many more crazy far ranging interests to discuss. 

Farmer Chris also got a call last night that a friend of theirs is looking for a home for two Nubian/La Mancha mix doe-lings and a buck-ling...After serious consideration I know I can't adopt any of them...but not adopting them is killing me, so I plan to mope around most of the day in my room drinking hot cocoa.  My Frida and Attila daydreams/fantasies haven't slowed down at all...and I had a dream a few nights ago that I drove down to get Frida, and was staying in a hotel with her while I tracked down Attila, and when I got back to the hotel Frida had totally destroyed everything.  What does it meeean?

We got snow overnight and it looks like it's December instead of April. Kind of confusing...and now I feel like listening to Christmas music. Hope you're all well.

Chicken Butchering: 101

I helped butcher 27 chickens yesterday – did everything but slit their jugulars. They were old laying hens that had started eating their own eggs.  One had taken to living down in the goat barn on her own and nobody could find any of her eggs anywhere.  I wonder if she was down there to feast on the lice perhaps?  Blech.  The oldest were probably about 7 or 8 years old. Definitely not "meat" birds.

Anyways, I helped catch them, carried them to the gallows, carried them from the gallows, dunked them in hot hot water and dropped them into the plucker machine, plucked any missed feathers, cut off feet and heads, gutted them and rinsed them and bagged them.  Crazy.  I think that’s all the animal-killing we’ll have to do this year… Feeling pretty reaffirmed in vegetarianism for now, though I may try some of the chicken soup they're making with those old hens.  The process was really fascinating once I got over the initial shock of seeing a living, squirming creature be drained of all its blood into the grass and lay still.  Once the feathers were off and I'd cut the heads and feet with the butcher knife, it really did look just like a chicken you'd buy wrapped in plastic at the store.  When we gutted them it felt like 7th grade biology, except this was much larger than a frog, and the organs seemed more familiar - intestines, esophagus, heart, squishy little lungs..all such pretty colors!  And the egg sacks were the coolest thing - we found so many partially formed yolks and eggs with all but the shell just waiting to get their crust so they could be layed. We collected about 7 or 8 actual eggs that were ready to eat, just hadn't popped out yet. I feel weird about eating those though... Not sure why. 

Farmer Chris had marked the ones she'd seen eating their own eggs with red twist ties around their feet.  It was kind of funny when we were preparing to chop off a foot and you see this little twist tie and say, that one there's a convicted egg eater. 

After they were all "processed" we had them sitting in a tub of cold running water.  We went in for 2nd breakfast and afterward I came out to help Farmer Paul finish drying and wrapping them up for storage and he said "It looks like a bathtub full of babies." So I lifted one up out of the water with my hands under its little wings and bounced it in the air and cooed.  Sick.  I got my father's sense of humor, I think.  :P Overall it was a really solemn affair.  Farmer Paul doesn't like to kill things, and while we were slicing their necks and they'd struggle he'd say, "Nothing likes to die." Which seems true.

He actually had the most comforting words for me when I told them about my little bird buckling that was paralyzed and had died alone in the pen during the night three Wednesdays ago - he said, you know, you're suffering emotionally for watching him suffer, but he was really just trying to live.  It hurts to see things struggling, but while they are in the midst of a struggle that's what they're focusing on... So I hope that the little buckling was laying in that straw trying and trying, and then just fell asleep and didn't wake up.  I hope that's what happened...though I wish I could have held him and told him it was okay to let go...that he didn't have all that much to look forward to anyways. 

Aaaaanyways. I don't live on a goat dairy anymore.  Butchering was an interesting experience, but I don't think I could butcher anything but poultry right now, and even that makes me sad when I think about it. I was holding two live ones waiting for their turn in the cones and a nice breeze came up, and I wondered if she, dangling there by her feet with her wings spread out, was still enjoying the sun and wind on her feathers... I just don't know. There's no way I could lead a little lamb or a cow to slaughter...absolutely nothing with big brown eyes. Though the dissection part would be interesting. 

The rest of the week we've been working in the greenhouse pretty much - seeding lettuce and peppers and tomatoes and kale and broccoli and fennel and celery and eggplant and transplanting all those and more.  Very interesting to learn about their germination process, what type of soil and temperature and light they require.  And I didn't think these little seedlings would be quite so cute. I love pulling a little one up with the scupula tool and seeing its long roots stretch out - you can just about hear the little thing let out a contented sigh when you plant them down in a couple inches of nice soil...nice and roomy.  Cute. Cute. Cute. :) It feels like we're in there doing a service to all these little guys - rescuing them from suffocating spaces and releasing them into wide open space.  I like this part.

Graphic photos of chicken butchering to follow...

 

And the most graphic picture... :/ 

Foxtail Farm

I've arrived. And I'm smitten.  Everyone has been fabulous so far, and I'm already especially fond of their new little doe, Olive, who is expecting a baby around May 27thish, I believe... :) 

It's nice to finally be here after so much anticipation.  And I'm already feeling pretty well at home.  Last night everyone sat around the wood stove in the living room chatting for a bit, eating chips and messing around on the guitar.  Pretty much all my favorite things.

I can already tell I won't be spending nearly as much time online as I did in NM, so I think I'm going to switch to email updates... Let me know if you want to receive them - slojulia@gmail.com.  :)

Much love and many hugs to you all,
Julia.

White Sands

Holy wow.

Amazing.

We're in Roswell tonight. No extraterrestrial activity as yet. We'll keep you updated.
Tomorrow off to the caverns and staying with relatives tomorrow night. Looking forward to some good stories and family history lessons...and general re-connecting with my people! :)

It's been a great adventure. Thanks for reading and supporting me through all my rants and heartbreaks. I'm sure this will continue when I go north in a couple weeks. Not surprising that there being goats there waiting for me to meet is a huge comfort to me...  I decided not to bring Frida home with me...but am thinking perhaps when I do have a farm, I may come down and adopt a daughter of hers...or her and her daughters...and one of Maddy's puppies.  They think she might be pregnant...or will be soon...what with all her gallivanting around with those ornery boys and all. Anyhoo.

It works out in my fantasy world.


*Also, if you're interested...this made me feel even better about the whole disbudding concept and practice, recommended by Alyssa. She makes really good points, and I feel a lot better about her system for the procedure... I feel like the process we used was pretty bare-bones and not nearly as thought-through as hers... But I'm gone...so I'm not going to get into it.  Really great article though: http://fiascofarm.com/goats/disbudding.htm

Much love and many hugs.

On the Road

Howdy!

Well, after some sad goodbyes yesterday, Nicole and I went up to Santa Fe to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum.  We only saw two blatant paintings of the lady bits.  Very cool museum though.  Wandered around the square, then headed to ABQ where we got a couple drinks with Steph and Stephen and had a late dinner at a Thai place.  So tasty. :)

Heading to White Sands today, Carlsbad tomorrow, and Kansas City on Friday. Surreal!

It was hard to let Frida go... I was crying and the mamas came up taking turns sniffing and licking my face.  Dog came up and rubbed her head on me and then wandered off... I couldn't go back in the barn after I'd finished feeding...Don't think I'd ever come out...  <3  Sigh.  I'm not built for these goodbyes.  I think after a couple more years of this I will be more than satisfied to just have a piece of land and never leave it again for a long long time...

<3 julia.

Torture.

Torture is the word of the day. 

After morning feeding and just before lunch, Ed decided to start de-horning the babies.  We gathered all the ones with little nubbins of horns and put them in a small pen.  One by one, Stephen and Ed took a baby out and put them in a torture box. Oh, I mean a "holding" box - a narrow rectangular box, just wide enough to slide the baby down into - a board between its front and back legs, and a small hole out the front with a pad thing so their heads can be held down.  Ed puts a lid on the box, sits on top and Stephen holds the head of the baby down hard, with its ears pulled to the side...then Ed puts a hot electric iron - a little circle shape - over the nubbins and burns the tissue surrounding the horn bud - first the left, then the right.  The baby screams, the smell of burnt hair wafts by, they lift the lid, and then mamabeargoatmama descends and whisks them away to offer cuddles and bottles of warm goat milk.  I expected this to be incredibly horrifying to watch. As the time approached I started getting choked up and my eyes were watering... But after the first few babies, I saw that they started screaming upon being put in the box, and the intensity of their crying didn't change all that much with the iron... I mean, I'm sure it hurt like hell, but other than being a bit dazed afterward, they didn't seem especially tender.  By this evening they were all playfully headbutting each other.

Despite the lack of blood curdling screams, it did hurt to see the lid lifted, and this lively creature sitting there totally still and resigned... Many of them, when I picked them up and held them for a while just laid limp in my arms.  Many thoughts throughout this experience... This is probably less painful than getting gorged by a sibling's horn later in life...and definitely makes them easier to handle... But I also wondered if fighting and what not is more of an issue with large herds, and that perhaps this whole de-horning thing is yet another one of these unintended consequences/necessities of scale?  It was also interesting that all the babies in the pen were milling about generally happy when it began, but as the screaming continued and their numbers dwindled (we did close to 30 of them) they began moving, still with their tails wagging, to the farthest corner of the pen from where Stephen had been picking them out.  If you'd just walked over in the middle you wouldn't have noticed, and they would have seemed completely oblivious to the shouts....but watching them throughout the process it was clear that they sensed something dangerous was happening to their peers... Yet another situation where their awareness is more acute than it seemed.  

Oh, and when they finish burning the tissue they spray the nubs with an antiseptic solution thing that contains purple dye...So when it was over I had a bunch of purple and charcoal-y marks on my face and neck and arms...  Pobrecitas. 

After this fun experience (sigh) we had lunch, went out to check on a mama in the barn, which soon turned into even more heart-wrenching drama when after about 10 min with hooves sticking out and the water broken, and over an hour of contractions without hardly any dilation, Ed gave this mama oxytocin and then started reaching in.  I, as usual, had to kneel in front of the mama and put an arm around her, so that when she tried to escape Ed's reach she wouldn't be able to get away.  Ed tried pulling gently along with the contractions, but the baby wouldn't budge, and when he reached in a bit further, he could tell the head was there, but it was twisted in a weird way so as to block it up against her pelvis bone or something crazy along those lines....... So he had to reach further to try to adjust the baby's position, and the mama just wailed and bellowed and gnashed her teeth...her ears went up, her tongue was hanging out to the side and turned white, and her eyes were rolling back so you could barely see the pupils...  She'd stretch her neck against the straw and then thrash a bit while Ed pulled.  It was torture.  Several times she rubbed her head against my stomach and pushed against me, burying her nose and forehead into me, grunting.  Then she'd lift her head and exchange sniffs with me nose to nose and she'd make little whimpers and lick my cheek.  Ahhhhhhhh... I was near tears, but made me think of my days at the rape crisis center, when they told us that it was ok to cry when someone shared their story, but that you should never respond more strongly than they were - you had to stay in control, etc...  Sooooo...I didn't cry.  I offered her my fingers and told her she could bite them if it would help - she could take them clear off if that would take away some of the anguish she was going through...she didn't. She just licked me.  Aiya. 

To make a long story slightly shorter, Ed pulled the baby out. It was a massive buck, rivaling the size of Bruno when he was born... And Ed left to get some stuff done, and about 10 minutes later, I had to pull the second one. I held his one exposed leg and got my other hand around the neck, but I remember looking at her skin around the opening - how taught and stretched it was - and thought "there's no way this can stretch any further".   I suppose it must have, because the baby came out.  Another massive buckling.  Within a few minutes she was standing and licking them down.  The first buckling is in bad shape...He still hasn't stood up and has only taken the colostrum that we've forcefully drained down his throat for him... I hope he'll be ok. <3

I think we had 9 babies today. One born dead...so it would have been ten. I've lost exact count, to be honest, of how many babies we've had total. And by the end of the day today I couldn't honestly remember what the first baby of the day looked like, or if that black and tan one was from this afternoon or yesterday morning... I don't know if I've just maxed out or am checking out or what, but it's become almost impossible to keep it all straight in my head.

After giving the babies their colostrum and treating navels, we fed the other bottle babies again, had a couple hour break, and then had evening chores and feeding... finished at 9:30. I'm going to get something to eat and crash. One more full day of this... 

And I've been thinking about Frida...and how really, unless I plan to keep her myself there's no reason to take her up there with me... And the chances of me having the money or the land are slim to none... Sooo... I dunno.  We'll see. I'll keep you updated. <3