Day 23: Tractor Happy!

We had to cross the dirt road that bisects the pasture that the chicken tractors are on which meant pulling them about 4 times as far, it was a quite a good work out! After chores Jim said meet me at the tractor for another lesson, and I lit up inside! He gave me another run through of how everything works and then I got to drive it. I was working all day cleaning out goat pens so I had to go in, rake all the manure and straw up, shovel it into the wheel barrow, dump the wheel barrow in the bucket of the tractor, and once the bucket was full I would drive it to the other side of the farm where the compost is. It was a lot of sweaty dusty work so by the end of the day I was covered in a thick layer of dust. I ended up having to where a white doctors mask thing-a-ma-bob to keep the dust out of my throat. I worked on the pens from about 9 till 2 with a brief lunch break. I also took a short 5 minute Farmers Nap in the bucket of the tractor once I had filled it with trash bags. Not the gross kind of trash bags with food and rotting scraps in them. They were primarily full of empty feed bags, and scrap tarping and soft things of that sort, so they were the inviting, come nap on my sort of trash bags. :)

At one point Stubbs kept trying to sneak in to the feed room where I was sweeping out the chicks old pen and I kept telling him to scram but he kept inching in a little further, the way cats do, and finally I decided I was going to have to go move him. I started to step over the retaining wall that kept the chicks in  brooder 1 and then didn't raise my back foot high enough so it tripped me a little bit, I had the shovel in my hands so I slammed it down in front of me to catch myself, like it was a walking stick, but of course it made a loud clang. Poor Stubbs though got frightened by my sudden movement and then the loud metallic bang, and tried turning around so fast that he bonked his little cat noggin on the door and it made a decent sounding collision! He barely stopped though and just tore out of there as soon as he had his wits about him. I was laughing because the sound of cat skull on wooden door was funny, but I also felt bad for accidentally scaring him. 

We made up later though because he actually came to join me on during my Farmers Nap for a Cat Nap of his own. 

When I was cruising around on the tractor today, I was hit with a metaphor for the way Jim teaches.

I realized that I felt exponentially more capable and knowledgeable about the workings of the farm and things like that, and I attribute that largely to Jim's teaching style. Whether he is aware of it or not, Jim teaches in a very sustainable way. In permaculture we learned that true sustainability takes the majority of the work on the front end of a project, whether it's the planning phase or implementation phase and it can often seem like more work than it's worth, but if all goes according to plan, then later on when whatever it was that you were having to nurture takes root, than ideally it should be on it's own two feet and not further input from you. This is what sustainability is all about, it's opposite would be perhaps Big Ag, where they start off things with a short cut, and rather than re mediating soil or taking the proper steps to help the earth heal, they just inject it with synthetic fossil fuel based fertilizer. This is a quick fix but it will need to happen over and over again, there is no life in the soil, it is essentially a sterile growing platform that is the middle man between the growing crop and the injections that crop is dependent on. Now Jim took the time early on to meticulously explain things to me, showing me where tools go, how to tie certain knots, which gears on the drill are best for certain jobs. He put in a lot of effort in my first couple weeks, but he was building up some deep rich living soil that I can now grow in sustainably. This metaphor is all just a way to say that I appreciate the way Jim took his time in teaching me, and he also get to reap the benefits of being able to give me fairly brief instructions on a task and know that it is being done well. The Egg-Mobile is a perfect example of that, the whole time I was building it, he was giving minor inputs here and there, specifying what he wanted done, and then I was left alone to do it! It's a great way to teach and a great way to learn! 

After I finished with cleaning the goat pens, which was all preparation for tomorrows farm tour, I went over to help Tina with preparation for the Market tomorrow which she and I will be working while Jim hosts the tour. Later tomorrow night they have a dinner function that they have to go to. I likened this weekend to 8th or 9th week of a term in college where all the due dates some how seem to end up on the same day! She laughed and agreed.

When I ran back to my barn area I to grab something for Tina I pass a pair of shorts on the ground with one little Colm sized cowboy boot still threaded through the leg of the shorts, and then the other boot a couple feet ahead, it was clear that Colm, for whatever reason, had stripped while on the go! It was a comical site. He often drives around his little plastic John Deer tractor in just underpants, boots and a cowboy hat. 

We all worked on preparing for market till about 5, when I broke off to do chores, and Tina broke off to take the kids swimming and cook dinner. I finished chores and then met Jim back at the work shop and kept working till about 7:15. It was dark by the time we finished working and it'll be dark tomorrow for a good hour while I am working because we are rising early to make it to market. They weren't kidding in the application when they said "sometimes we work till after dark, and are up before the sun." It just some how works out that those days and nights always go back to back.  It's about 8:15 right now I haven't showered or anything because I had dinner again with the family. Tina said it was because we worked late, but I am still kind of hungry because there wasn't quite enough spaghetti to fill me up, and I haven't showered and still smell like Diesel. All that being said, I bid you all a fond farewell until tomorrow night when I will hopefully be regaling you with wonderful stories of my time at the market! Oh and the reason today's post is called tractor happy, is because Jim said that I had the "Tractor Happy" look in my eye today.