I mean, I'd certainly rather be spending time with her since it's super awesome being able to visit her. But we both have some much to get done that I think this is working out well. And in an hour we will be heading out on the town for some food and we may even meet up with Bernardo!! Which is absolutely crazy since he moved away so long ago and I haven't seen him in years. It doesn't feel like that though. For some reason it feels like Bernardo never really left…idk.
So this week was filled with less chaos but still lot's of fun!
On Monday we picked another 250 lbs of tomatoes, so those pups are really are their prime. It's awesome! CSAers are going to get a hell of a lot of tomatoes next week.
The contrast between last week's picking and this week's picking was odd though, since last week we were all freaking out, "257 lbs! Oh my god!" Now we just take it in stride, "Oh yeah, that's a lot."
Also on Monday I achieved a good Zen(n). It no longer felt like work, instead it just felt like…life. And that was amazing. And liberating.
Tues. morning we found out that there was supposed to be a frost on Wed. night, so for the next two days, we prepared. We picked all the corn, carrots, and radishes and washed and stored all of them. We put hay around the greenhouse and pulled a lot of our herbs and potted them. We also potted some rice plants! And our final task was to put the agerbond over Fergie, which was much easier than the first time we put it up for the frost we had 2 weeks ago.
The really weird thing about this week is that there was no CSA! An Italian couple came by the farm to drop off some wood on Tues., and the wife told us that it was supposed to get down to 25 Thursday night! So Jen made the decision to stay home on Thursday and help us ready for the hard frost. It didn't help that the jeep is having problems and we're not quite sure when that can get fixed. So there was no picking and processing! Just readying for frosts.
Thursday morning, Jen came out the greenhouse to check on things and told us that the weather was saying it was only supposed to get down to 34 that night, so we could spend our day doing other projects which turned out to be haying the front yard: project kill the grass!
That was actually pretty fun. I really like having Jen come out and work with us. It just feels right. And taking a break from the field is always nice. Plus, this was the idyllic farm scenario. Pitchforks in hand, we filled the wagon with hay. It was what you imagine when you think of farms.
Eventually though, we got tired of the wagon and just began rolling the giant hay bales down the hill. That was a good bit of excitement. We ran into a tree and a rose bush…
And no, you don't need machines to roll hay bales. Yes, they are huge. Don't underestimate human strength.
We finished that job and went in to eat lunch. But after lunch we stayed inside-away from the hay that was making us wheeze, and made Pizza. FROM SCRATCH!
Tess's shaped pizza
My shaped pizza
It was really fun! Tess and I made the dough. It really wasn't that difficult. I'm not sure why making your own pizzas doesn't happen more often. The only difficult part was kneading it, and that's because it never got elasticy like the directions said it would. So even though the cookbook said to knead the dough for 8 minutes, we ended up kneading it for at least half an hour.
It was all good though since we had Twilight to listen to! haha. Jen goes to the library and gets books on CD, and last week she got Twilight. Listening to that with Tess and Jen is probably one of my favorite things to do. It really is a brilliant comedy. :p I mean, come on. Bella + Edward = BEDWARD. Clever. Oh Stephanie Myer, how you astound me. Jen has said on multiple occasions now, "I just wanna punch Stephanie. I really do."
Teen Erotica at it's worst. That is Twilight.
The pizzas turned out wonderfully! The sauce was made from our tomatoes, basil, arregeno, thyme, garlic, onion, etc… and the green pepper topping was also from our farm. I'm pretty sure that was the best pizza I've ever had. And while we were eating it, Horse even came up on the porch and looked into the living room, as if to say, "can I have some?" It was hysterical.
On Friday Kai came back from the city and so we were planning to rotary plow the whole day (HELL), but other things got in the way. For instance, Sophie, our cow, got out of her pen somehow. So her and her calf, Horse, were chilling in the hay we just put down. It was about time we returned Sophie to the Hallorans, so we figured we would just walk her back to their farm then and there. (The Hallorans let Channery Hill borrow Sophie for the summer, but it's time for the cows to go home.)
It was really fun walking the two cows down the road. Similar to walking a dog, but…on a larger scale. haha
We were all sad when we finally had to say bye to Sophie, though. I almost teared up myself and I never even milked her!
Thank you for being such a good cow, Soph.The rest of the day we went back to purgatory and continued moving the endless amount of rocks from the newly plowed lower lower field. Tess and I were going to give Kai a break from plowing and do a row, but Tess went first and when she got to the end of the row and I was about to take over she said, "DON'T DO THAT. IT's HORRIBLE. Just don't do it." So, I took her advice and continued throwing rocks.
By about 6:30 it had deteriorated to us just trying to throw rocks as far as we could. We were practicing our baseball pitches. :)
Friday night was also the night we finished Twilight while fishing out rotten potatoes from the potato bin. We're ready for the next part of the saga!
Have you been able to stay in that state of Zen? I can find myself getting there sometimes with things, but I can never maintain it.
ReplyDeleteTerrefic name for a calf, by the way. Horse. Brilliant.