Last post!

This will be my last post of my farm adventure and what an adventure it has been! I am incredibly grateful for this experience and all it has taught me.

It has been a fun and exciting wind down. I have always enjoyed change, big or small! Since I last posted a fair amount has happened. For starters one of our "wild turkeys", the ones we let just roam around the farm, was eaten by coyotes. It was Jim and I who solved the mystery, I spotted some broken eggs on the path out to the chicken tractors and notified Jim who started the investigation. Then we found some bloody feathers from her, and that was near some tall grass so we searched around in there for her clutch of eggs. We found it sure enough but all but one eggs was broken. I grabbed the egg for Guy, I like eating eggs half a dozen at a time, 1 egg would just be a tease.

In other news, when I first arrived we had Boris the Boar separated from the two sows. But recently while trying to give the growing piglets some more space Boris escaped his pen while the electric fence was off and went to join the sows. Seeing as he is 500 pounds and only 2/3rds full grown there wasn't much at the time that we could do to separate him out. Jim could have lassoed him and then picked him up with the tractor or something but he didn't see the point. It wasn't until the sows started limping that we thought there might be a problem. By the time they were both physically incapable of getting themselves up we realized that Boris was perhaps being a little overzealous in his mating style. We tricked him out of the fence with some grain, and seeing as the sows couldn't walk it was fairly easy task. So now that we had seperated them again we had to start tending to the pigs. Jim told me that for the next week I was going to be a pig physical therapist. He showed me how to massage there back leg muscles and for the last week every hour I had to go and pick them up, these girls are 300lbs each. I was really just lifting the back of them and encouraging them to stand up, then I would bring there food and water dishes to them because they would usually flop back over as soon as I let them go. They started showing improvement about two days ago and are now able to walk around by themselves for about 10 minutes at a time so that is good.

Up until yesterday Boris just continued to hang around the edges of there fencing because he wanted to get back in with the sows and we hadn't moved him back to his original pen yet which was on the other side of the pasture. It was working out fine though because as long as the girls could re-cooperate it didn't matter if Boris grunted after them all day long. But like I said, everything was fine and dandy until yesterday. Yesterday I was re-configuring the electric fencing in the outer pasture to give the cattle more forage while still protecting the chicken tractors. I was walking through some tall grass to the north of the pasture that the piglets, sows and Boris share, to plant some electrical posts when all the sudden I heard an almost dog like bark and turned around to see Boris charging through the perimeter electrical fence surrounding the piglets. The thing about the pigs are in the words of Jim, "They can't see for shit." Ha, quite elegantly put, and very true. The pigs have awful eye sight and their ears hang low and are always positioned right over there eyes, I'm not sure if its for shading or what but for whatever reason, some loud rustling near Boris scared him and caused him to bowl through the fence that was still electrified. I quickly stopped my task of setting up new fencing and when to save the piglets. If Boris put the 300 lbs sows out of commision by mounting them, imagine what he would do to 100 lbs piglets, or rather, don't imagine it because it would be awful. Anyhow I ran into the pen, guns blazin! and started to push him off the piglets and away from them in general. The piglets didn't make it easy on me though because most of them were curious about this new addition to there pen, pigs are very curious critters, and they kept running up to Boris and I for a better look/sniff. All of my weight was required to push Boris but once I started smacking him on the rear and chasing him in the direction of his original pen I thought maybe just maybe I would be able to get him in there. Just as I thought this thought however Boris wheeled around foaming at the mouth and gave me a look as if to say, "ok farm boy, you got me this far but now I'm going back to those piglets." He started advancing towards me and similar to when I had my boxing match with hershy the billy goat, I went straight into wrestling mode! I put my forearm on his head/neck area, since there is no definitive end of the head and beginning of the neck its just all muscle. Before I go any further with the story I'll throw in the fact that since pigs are wallowers and rooters, meaning they dig their own mud wallows with their nose and root for buried nuts or roots with there nose  all by raising their head up and down, quite like a bull. So they also have similar neck muscles as a bull which is incredibly strong. Okay back to the story, so I'm bearing down on his head/neck area with my forearm and start to slow him down when he easily just raised his head quickly essentially throwing me up into the air, simultaneously he starts running forward towards the little piggies again. So when I started my downward descent I landed right on his back and bounced around on top of him for a good 5 seconds, until I finally bounced off the back of him. Luckily I landed on my feet and ran ahead in front of him which caused him to stop briefly. I realized that my "heavy hands" wrestling technique wasn't going to work on this 500 lbs beast but I wasn't giving up, he started to make a move to go around me again and this time I let him pass just so that he was to the side of me and essentially I "took a shot" which is wrestling jargin for an attempt to grab your opponents leg to either pick him up and then drop him to the ground or any other variety of moves but basically it is a move to put your self in the dominant position. So I took my shot on Boris, and seeing as he has 4 legs and most of my opponents in high school had only 2 legs it took me a  moment to decide which leg to grab. I ended up reaching for his far right front leg and I was on his left side, as soon as my had clasped around his ankle I threw my shoulder into him has hard as I could while pulling his leg toward me as  hard as I could. It couldn't have worked better he flopped right over, as the saying goes, big tree fall hard.

He laid there for a second and then got up and looked at me, I resumed smacking his hindquarters and chasing him towards his original pen until we reached that point of him turning around again, at about the same distance from his pen as last time. This time however I let him start to pass me and then took my shot again and again until I wore him out, eventually he just got up and stood there looking as me and I was able to "gently" push him all the way into his old pen which just had the electric wiring up on the top notch of the post. The wires were up to allow the piglets access to his old pen but now that I had Boris back in there I quickly pulled the wire insulators out of my back pocket that I just so happened to have seeing as I was working on the outer pasture fencing before this whole fiasco had started. The electricity was still running through all the fencing in the interior of the pigs pasture so I just used the wire insulators to lower the wires into a position that neither Boris or the piglets could get through. Mission Complete!

This whole last week I have had the added pleasure of feeding the cattle in the mornings during chores. Even though the days still get to 75 it gets below freezing every night which kills a lot of the grasses that they normally would be eating. So I drive a bale of hay about a half mile out to their corrals every morning when the sun comes up so that they get that as a supplement to the dried dead grass they graze on through out the day. I enjoy doing it because all the cows and horses come running up to me and start munching on the bale before I even unload it. They are all huge animals and it is just a cool feeling to think about how small I am compared to them.

In addition to feeding the cattle I have been doing a lot of tractor work with preparing the pastures for the spring time. As you all know I already mowed and disced most of the fields and this last week I have been seeding them and harrowing in the seeds as well as setting up the flood irrigation pipes and checking on them through out the day. Checking the irrigation some times means doing it at night because once you start flooding a zone you don't shut the water off until it has reached the end of that flood zone otherwise that part doesnt get water. It can take up to 8 hours to water a whole zone and the last two nights I have been walking out there at 9pm in the pitch black with just my little head light and the whole universe stretched out above me. It is one of my favorite things about living in the country is the beautiful landscape and night sky.

A point about all my tractor work; what it has made me realize is that Diesel is an INCREDIBLE help to a farmer, it just would not be possible to do all that I have done on that tractor by hand with just 1 farmer and 2 interns. Ultimately what it has made me realize is that there is nothing black and white about the way our food is produced. I can now see the allure of Big Ag farming, accomplishing so much, feeding so many people all as a single person with vast amounts of diesel and technology. When I first got here, partially because of what I had learned in school I almost hated big scale agriculture, I had learned all the horrible facts and statistics about it and was of the mind set of, "why don't people get it! Why can't people see we are killing the earth??" But I now see the conundrum we are in, now that I know the amount of effort it takes to grow food for 16 families I see why we have Big Ag. Now that I have spent how ever many saturdays hand picking, sorting and washing enough lettuce, turnips, spinach,arugula and any other greens for our CSA members I see why we have Big Ag. After having each Saturday be a minimum of a 14 hour day and then getting up at the crack of dawn the next morning to drive an hour into town so that our CSA members can come pickup there neat and tidy bags of produce I see why there is Big Ag. And after haggling over a nickles and dimes with customers about the price of our organic retail produce I see why there is Big Ag. There is Big Ag because it is EASY, and we live in a culture of convenience where even the people who want to buy organic and come to the market and "meet their farmer" they still don't want to pay more than what they do at the super market or have wash dirt off their lettuce. However, even though I now see the reasons why Big Ag is attractive and I stand by the fact that the ends don't justify the means and that it is not worth having cheap veggies in your local supermarket and the expense of the earth. And now that I know from experience the kind of work that it takes to produce food sustainably in a way that is good for both humans and the earth I still see it has a valuable thing to put effort towards but sadly, I feel that unless the whole world gets behind this movement of healing the earth and growing good food at the same time, I think that organic farming at the current stage its at will merely slow down the rate at which our earth is destroyed.

On a yummier note! Sundog went hunting the other day and bagged himself a young buck which has more meat on it than he can eat. So he gave Guy and myself some venison as well as a large roast that he gave to Jim and Tina. Guy and I had the back strap, which is the cut of meet that runs down either side of the spine, on a cow it is where the filet mingon comes from and it is equally delicious from a deer. Guy grilled up some onions while I grill up the deer steaks and we enjoyed a very fine meal!

Then the next night, last night, was sort of my farewell party as well as a way to eat the whole roast that Sundog gave the folks in one sitting. Tina cooked up the roast, which is the hindquarter of the deer with garlic and rosemary. Jim made mashed potatoes, Sundog grilled some deer ribs and Guy, and I brought our appetites! It was a fun little party, the kids scampered off after 15 minutes but us "adults" sat around the table talking late into the night (9pm) at which point I realized I had to go check the irrigation. It was a true feast, I forget how many helpings I had but it was a LOT. After dinner Sundog and I said our farewells, he his a real little guy and I wasn't sure if he was down for a hug or not so I just shook his hand, a little to hard I guess because he pull it away shaking it and grinning at me, and then he hugged me, it was nice, he invited me to come visit him any time I'm in Arizona. He was a completely unplanned for part of this farm experience but I am really grateful that I was able to learn all that I did from him.

I spent today, Tuesday doing chores in the morning and then mucking out all the pens one last time for the sake of sentimentality. And then after lunch I started packing, I pretty much everything into my new pack that Jim gave me which is very exciting because it gives me a feel of how much I can take to Thailand. I did afternoon chores as well and now, I'm writing this, my last post.

I have a few pictures to end things on, just pictures of cute animals and landscapes.

This is Tiny in her cast, Colm dropped her and fractured her leg but she doesn't let it get her down!

This is a kitty sleeping in a chickens laying box.

I would like to thank all my readers and supporters, this has been a wonderful adventure and I'm glad other found it interesting enough to want to tune in every now and then.

9 days left

Hey folks, well its been interesting starting to think of certain things as officially winding down, 9 days isn't a whole lot of time but I think 3 months has been the perfect amount of time to be here for I am neither upset that my time is almost up, nor over joyed.

Since I last posted we have continued work in the garden, mostly just feeding old plants from the summer crop through the wood chipper and building a compost pile its a really amazing thing that we can compost what used to directly feed us with its fruits, turn it into soil and then have it help grow new plants that will bare new fruit and continue to feed us. The thing of it its that aside from the labor inputs and the small diesel input for running the wood chipper, its a really cheap sustainable way to continually produce good healthy soil rather than using the same patch of soil over and over and just pumping synthetic fertilizer in it.

Today while working we saw a couple of news vans driving past the garden and then one stopped and asked us if we had seen any sheriffs or knew where devils canyon was because three bodies had been found and they needed to report the news. It was just another reminder of the dangers of living in a border town.

It reminded me of last week when two Mexican girls came walking onto the farm and asked for help getting to Tuscon  Jim said that he couldn't help them but he gave them directions and told them that there was a border patrol checkpoint about 10 miles away. They left and went on there way but then showed back up around nightfall. Tina gave them some blankets to stay in the barn under. The next morning they asked Jim to call border patrol on them because they were too tired of walking and wanted to go home.

Guy and I will be making some butter tonight out of Missy Moo's cream and then after that we are making Pancakes! Yum! :)

Day 68-73.. I think:

My time here is winding down and as with many things, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes, kind of like a roll of toilet paper!

This will be a  fairly short post, by now I hope my regular readers have a sense of what a typical day is for me, 13 typical days are what I have left here!

I last left you guys at the beginning of a work week after just having spent 2 days building a tool shed with Randy.

The Saturday that I got back was a typical garden harvest and cleaning day, general market prep. Then Sunday was the Sunday Market which poured rain on us! Market got cancelled midway through but we stayed until all of our CSA members came to pick up there shares.

Monday was another turkey butcher, it took all day, and then Tuesday was bagging the turkeys!
Sadly, Fluffers, one of the barn cats has disappeared she has been gone for a while. Jim says she was "coyote bait" from the get go.

Wednesday was a day of more garden infrastructure, building hoop houses and pulling up old irrigation.

A reader has asked me to post a video demonstration of milking Missy Moo, I'm not sure how the sound quality is and its a pretty simple video, but if it sounds interesting to you here it is.

That's all I have for y'all this week!

Day 62-67: Thanksgiving turkeys, Tool sheds and puppies!

Well, I last posted after a good solid work week waiting to hear from Tina if I had work or not. Nothing came through so I ended up having two really good slow days off! I walked around the farms outskirts and really appreciated the natural beauty surrounding me. 


Saturday came along and I was mentally gearing up for a long day of snipping lettuce greens washing lettuce greens and then drying lettuce greens. It never came! Tina told me that there was a mesquite milling festival in Arivaca, the little artist community town a couple miles away and that they were having lots of vendors and wanted Walking J Farm to be there. So we drove down to Arivaca and I set up shop, Tina didn't expect me to make more $30 because its just a real small place. We got there early and it was pretty dead and after having set up and being the only vendor there for 40 minutes it was still dead. If you had been there you would have seen a small adobe plaster community center with a fenced in playground and lawn area out its front doors with a side walk leading from them to the parking lot with just one 19 year old kid set up with a stand trying to sell meat. It was a pretty interesting day. I was there from 10 till 4. What happened was that the man who owns the mesquite bean mill broke it and didn't want to pay for the repairs so he told the guy who organized the festival that he wasn't coming until 2 days before the festival. So the festival never really happened but plenty of people still came buy for the fundraiser buffet of home cooked meals for just $5. It smelled really good from outside in the chilly wind and around 11, Peter the man running the show came out and told me I could eat there too. I feasted on around 3 plates just then at 11 o'clock and then 2 more around 3:30. I had planned on calling Tina around 11:30 because she had said too call if it was super slow. however it was right around 11:15 that I started making sales enough to keep me around for the whole day and I ended up pulling in $150. So even though the festival never happened and none of the other vendors came, I made over 4 times what Tina expected and I got 2 free meals out of it! :)


Sunday was a fairly regular fun day at the market! I am starting to get to know our regular customers now which is cool to have a micro relationship with these people who were complete strangers before but over the last 2 months have become friends through the social setting that is a farmers market.


Monday was a turkey butcher day, in preparation for Thanksgiving, and then the first half of Tuesday was bagging all the turkeys. The butcher day was pretty interesting. I caught and killed a few but was mostly just picking feathers all day. It was an incredibly cold winding rainy day with driving rain for about 15 minutes that got us all nice and soaked, except for Sundog of course who was dressed for a blizzard. The more notable events of the butcher were when a few of the Turkeys had such nerve spasms after being killed that they kicked their way out of the kill cone and starting trying to run away. It gave whole new meaning to the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" except these were turkeys! The other interesting thing was when Sundog was gutting one of the the birds and he pulled a fully developed egg out of her as well as a sack of egg yolks that were about to turn into eggs. And Sundog being Sundog he took the egg and the egg sack home with him for dinner along with all the Turkey heads that we cut off that day! What a crazy guy!


As I said early Tuesday was just bagging all the birds which took about half the day, the latter part of the day was spent pulling up all the Tomato plants that got wiped out in the frost that finally came! 


Wednesday I was screening compost all day, it made me think of one of my earlier posts from when I first got here and was screening compost by hand thinking about how quickly the tractor could be doing the task. Well today I got to use the tractor! And in the same amount of time as when I was doing it by hand, I screened 10 times the amount with the tractor.


I took half my lunch break to just lay in the sun and stubs and Guy joined me about the same time so Guy snapped this cuddle picture. 

Wednesday night I took off to Tuscon with Tina to go to Maggie's dance recital and then get dropped off in a parking lot to be picked up by Randy, the same guy I worked for two weeks ago to get started building his tool shed.

I slept great in Randy's backyard it was a nice full moon to stare at until I fell asleep. Thursday morning he and I went to home depot and dropped $1000 on supplies, it was two hours of shopping. We drove it home and got straight to work! It was a good productive day and at the end of the day we had the base, floor and 4 wall frames up! I didn't end up taking a picture until well after sundown and we were working by spot light.

The next morning we nailed down some paneling on the two side walls and put on the rafters and the over hanging gable inns. I forgot to take a picture of it though. A neighbor of Randy's came by to help, his name was Gill and he was an ex-marine and was now starting to do MMA so he and I had plenty to talk about. It was a fun project to be working on, I had never built anything that big before so it was very gratifying!

I think tonight was my last cold shower, I know I have said that before and it's been almost 2 and a half months now of hose showers but the water temperature and air temperature are both so cold now that it isn't smart to continue getting wet and cold once the sun is down. It might be another story if we had a heated room but by 8 pm our room is almost air temperature and considering we have had a couple nights of 22 degrees I would say that cold showers are off the menu from here on out.

Here is some beautiful Arizona landscape!

Oh also we got two puppies! :)

Dotty is on the left, because of the dot on her head and the other one is still un-named!

Tonight is game night with some friends of Jim and Tina, and the interns are included! It should be a fun time!
That's all for now!

Day 56-61: Over sized baby's and Garden Infrastructure!

I last posted as I was about to head out to meet this man named Randy who had some work for me to do. It was an interesting 2 days because he couldn't pick me up until around 7pm Thursday night and the plan was for me to work for him all day Friday, but to get into Tuscon I had to leave with Tina around 11am Thursday morning. She stopped off for a two hour yoga session in Tuscon first thing when we arrived in the city. She gave me directions to a coffee shop where I could hang out until she was done. The thing was, I thought I was going straight to work, she hadn't filled me in on the plan of anything until we were on the road. So I walked into this coffee shop in my beaten up Carhartt boots and pants that still had goats blood on them (the butcher was the day before and laundry is hard to squeeze in.) I completed my coffee shop attire with my usual muscle shirt and stain ball cap. I definitely did not fit in with the coffee sipping crowd.

After 2 hours of reading Lord of the Rings I walked back to Tina's yoga studio and decided to give my Pops a call. I was giving him the first hand account of the more gruesome aspect of the day before's goat butcher like when Sundog skinned the face of the goat so he could eat the cheeks, tongue and eyes of the goat, right as the Yoga teacher stuck her head out the door and asked me to be quiet! I felt bad at first, and apologized to the teacher after the class was over, but in retrospect it was pretty funny. Just imagine being at the end of a hard yoga class, doing the Cevasena pose, which is where you just lay on the ground and rest while peaceful music is playing, and then you hear some over eager 19 year old outside talking on the phone about peeling goat faces and blowing into the esophagus end of the lungs to make them inflate like a balloon!

After Yoga Tina had to work the San Augustine market which is from 3 to 6, so for that I again just found a place to sit and read my book! After the market, we finally went to meet Randy. He drove me back to his place and then I pitched my tent in the back yard and crashed.

Work started for me around 5:45, I told Randy that's when I would be starting and he said he would be up to help but I guess his wife turned off his alarm before it woke him up because he didn't come outside until 7ish.
He made me some eggs and then his daughter and son didn't finish their eggs in time to catch the school bus so I ate the rest of theirs as well. We went back to work and he was surprised that I had cruised through about half of the tasks he had given me the night before. Tina wasn't due to pick me up until around 3:30 and I was already half done with the work he had for me and it was just now 8:30 am. By noon I had wrapped up everything on his list and he had to scramble to come up with some more stuff for me to do before he left for school. He is getting a masters in something I guess. He paid me well and said he was pleased with my work and after he left I still finished the stuff he gave me to do around 1:30 so I texted Tina and she came to pick me up early! Of all the stuff he had me do I most enjoyed dropping the Orange tree he wanted me to take out, bucking it up into small pieces and stacking it for pick up.

Back at the farm I finished my "days off" by helping Guy with chores and winding down the day with the usual routine of a short work out and a cold "hose shower". As I write this on November 3rd it has been over 2 months now that I have had a hot shower, I am quite used to the cold hose water.

Saturday was a very long day of harvesting and washing vegetables. Now that we are up to 20 shares and growing a lot of greens like lettuce and spinach, each piece of lettuce is harvested by hand with scissors  and washed by hand as well. The day started at 5:45 and we didn't end the day until around 7:30. Thankfully Tina cooked up a big pot of Goat Stew so Guy and I didn't have to worry about making ourselves dinner. It was delicious  Plus Jim doesn't really like goat meat, and the kids really only like PB&J so she boxed up the left overs for Guy and I.

Sunday was Guy's day off and Tina and Jim took the kids to market so I had the farm to myself. Jim at left me with my favorite type of task, heavy manual labor! :)

He had just ripped the North east corner of the garden which was about an acre of raw land that that hadn't done anything with yet but since we are expanding to more CSA shares we need more planting space. By "ripped" I mean that Jim drove all over that land with the tractor and the "ripping" implement which is a big heavy toothed piece of metal that burrows into the ground an breaks it up! It turns out that that section of the garden was the foundations of a school at one point and he ended up breaking off a lot of the teeth on his ripper on metal pipes and big chunks of concrete! So I spent all Sunday pacing up and down and around this acre of torn up land pulling out big rocks and chunks of cement and lengths of pipe! It was a fun, but long day of lifting and throwing rocks. Something about it was very gratifying though, it is the same as why I like setting up for market because like I said in my second post ever, for some reason I love moving heavy things from point A to point B as quickly as possible. It also made me flash back to two summers ago at camp when me and two of my best friends had a rock throwing competition. There were no rules or anything we were just on the edge of the lake seeing who could chuck a big rock the farthest, it was simple and fun and we went at it for an hour at least.

I ended up having no one to compete with but myself, and I was playing the game for 8 hours instead of one, but it was still lots of fun!

Monday was spent cutting raw 20 foot lengths of rebar into 16 inch segments, I had to do this because the rebar was what we would be using in the future to stake in our hoop houses. It was a very hot day Monday, probably mid 90's. And instead of producing saw dust, when cutting metal you produce flying sparks that land all over you. When I first got to the farm and I was building the egg mobile and doing some metal cutting I would make sure I had long sleeves and gloves so that no sparks were landing on me and that was just for a couple of 10 second cuts. Now a month and half later I was out there with a shirt or gloves cutting rebar for half the day and the sparks never bothered me. They were definitely landing all over me but I have just gotten so used to it that it hardly hurts. I remembered watching Jim make cuts in short sleeves and wondering how he stood the pain, and now I know that it is like most things in life, you just need practice and experience! I was of course wearing safety goggles because no amount of practice allows you to take a molten hot metal spark in the eye with out pain. :) I was sweating so much though that about every 20 minutes I had to take off my goggles and empty the sweat that was pooling in them. The rest of the day was spent pulling out more rocks and concrete from the new acre in the garden.

Monday night was Halloween!!! The family makes the hour long drive into Tuscon each year so that the kids have a proper trick or treating experience. Since trick or treating out here would require hours of walking and not much pay off in the way of candy. Tina insisted that Guy and I dress up since she was a witch and Jim was going as a cross dresser in one of her dresses! Ha, neither Guy nor I had planned for any sort of costume when packing for this trip and had to make due with what we had. I ended up loaning Guy my overalls and a straw hat and he was a scare crow. My plan was just to wear my onezie and carry around a cow bottle and an moracca that was supposed to be a rattle and tell people that I was a baby.

We all loaded into the little Volvo and since there were only 5 seats and 6 of us, I rode in the trunk for an hour both ways! We stopped on hour way into Tuscon to go grocery shopping for me and Guy, and after already being in the trunk for half an hour I realized my costume was way to hot. As we were walking into the store, Jim in drag, Tina in witches make up and guy and I in our rather lame costumes I made the joke of wishing I had just a diaper to wear and that my onezie was to hot. Jim suggested I buy some extra large diapers in the grocery store and try to squeeze in. I ended up buy some "depends" which is an adult diaper brand that I didn't even know existed until now! And my costume was born!

It was fun trick or treating with the kids and everyone at the party got a kick out of my costume as well as lots of people on the streets. A couple of times I had complete strangers come up to me and ask to have their picture taken with me! It was a wild night!

Tuesday we were back to work on the hoop houses in the garden. Today I was cutting the 20 foot lenghts of PVC pipe into 6 1/2 foot lengths. These would be bent over the bed and slid onto the rebar that would be hammered on either side of the bed.

The PVC took all day to cut because each cut had to be measured and marked first and then cut, where as on the metal saw I just put up a stop 16 inches away from my blade and slid the rebar through until it hit the stop. But Jim wanted the PVC more accurately cut.

Wednesday, yesterday was the implementation of all the preparations that I had done the last two days. I hammered in rebar 4 ft and 4 inches wide and spaced every six feet down the lengths of all the new beds. then putting the PVC on was easy!

The final product looks like this:

The row covers get taken off in the day time and then put back on at night.

That took me about half the day and I got about half the beds done but ran out of rebar stakes so we will have to acquire more before we finish the other beds. up untill this point we have just been laying row covers over the beds and weighting them down with rocks but now with the hoops taking up slack in the fabric we have to clip them on. To buy the clips needed it would cost 400 bucks and as Jim put it, Guy and I basically cost him nothing. So the three of us set up an assembly line and manufactured the clips needed in about 3 hours.

That's pretty much all that has happened since I last posted. It is currently 10 am Thursday morning and I am waiting to hear from Tina if I have any work for today and tomorrow or not!

Day 50-55: Life is good!

Not a whole lot out of the ordinary has happened over the last five days!

We switched from 13 CSA members to 20 so now we have bigger harvests and longer Saturdays which is when we bag everything into nice packages for them to pick up at Sunday market.

Some clouds rolled in on the morning of 10/24 which marked the end of the record highs for the month of October and started us more towards fall weather. But it still was in the lower 90's for a couple days.

Stubbs has lost his sleep over privileges because a few nights back he mistook my duffle bag for a litter box and left me an abnormally large "present" for a cat his size. It stank something awful and we couldn't find it for about 5 hours. All we knew was that He had either throw up or pooped somewhere in our room. Eventually the smell got strong enough that I was able to follow it with my nose back to it's source, which was my bag.

I disced six fields with the tractor, which is just a step of breaking up the earth before we plant winter forage crops for the cattle. The discing took two full days of bumping a long on the tractor in 4 hour segments. I have grown to like it a lot though! :) maybe I'll start a business where I allow people to drive a tractor for 4 hours straight and then pay me, I'll call it "tractor therapy" or something like that!

Yesterday was kind of a big day, we butchered two goats for some friends of Jim and Tina. It was my first experience with killing and skinning and butchering up the meat into certain cuts. Although Sundog was the one who pulled the trigger on both goats it was pretty intense to be three feet from the goat when it was shot. Because then I hoisted it up by a rope flung over a rafter so it was hanging up side down and then we cut it's throat to bleed it dry. The first introduction to killing was rough because the first goat took three bullets to the head before it died and it was making a racket and bleeding everywhere the whole while that it had the first two bullets in its head. It was kinda hard to watch, but the second goat died immediately and it just felt like a much cleaner kill.

So Sundog showed me how to gut it, skin it and then cut all the meat off the body into usable portions. It was pretty straight forward and it is something I have wanted to learn how to do for a while so I was happy to have the information in my head. He also showed me a "sure fire way to get the ladies" as he took one of the lungs after we had eviscerated the goat and blew into it from the esophagus end causing it to inflate the lungs. It was pretty funny.

After we finished the first goat he killed the second one but I did everything else, it was fairly easy once I had the proper instruction. It made me think of the time in college when I tried skinning a road kill deer that I found, just for practice not really intending to use the hide or any meat. I ended up giving up after 2 hours because I had no idea what I really should be doing and it smelled awful. It was a much more pleasant experience with a proper mentor and a fresh animal.

Sundog put both hides into a freezer bag and stuck them in the freezer so hopefully he will show me how to tan the hides at some point in the future!

All in all despite the first goat killing where it took three bullets, the whole experience was really interesting and I am really glad that I have some more practical knowledge. It may sound morbid or grotesque to some of my readers but I think that it is far from morbid or grotesque. It may be an unfortunate reminder to all of us meat eaters out there that for us to live, other living breathing creatures must die but I think that rather then swearing off meat or anything like that I will probably continue to eat meat, but I definitely have a better mind set about it and be as grateful to the animal that I am eating even if I was not the one to kill it and butcher it. I think the Native Americans were pretty spot on with the way they would say thanks and prayers for animal as they hunted and killed it, as well as while they were eating it.

It is Thursday morning and I am on my "day off" but in an hour I will be heading to another couples house where I will be doing some work and raising some money for Thailand adventures!


If you are curious about the finer details of the goat butcher, or anything, feel free to email me or leave a comment with questions!

Day 44-49: Farm Life goes on. :)

So I last left you guys on the eve of my two "Days Off" working for a man named Alan and his wife Suzanne. They ended up being such great host's and incredibly nice people. Suzanne is a  doctor and Alan is a "house husband" who know how to cook up some great stuff! They do medical missionary work in the Solomon Islands twice a year which is really cool I think. Alan let me watch a documentary about them that was made about there trips, the documentary is up for an Emmy nomination. They paid me well and fed me well and all in all it was a successful two day trip! It was also hard resisting their tempting king size bed and hot shower they offered me. I haven't had a hot shower in over a month and a half now, so while there I made sure I took a cold shower so I wouldnt get spoiled! I also opted out the the king sizes suit and pitched my tent, much to the dismay of Alan and Suzanne, as I had originally planned. They were obviously quite confused about why anyone would turn down such luxuries!

After my two "days off" Thursday and Friday, coincidentally enough I got another "day off" on Sunday! By that I mean Guy and I did chores in the morning as usual, and chores in the evening as usual but from 10 till 5 we were on an Ethnobotany Hike through Sycamore Canyon which is south of us. Sundog was our guide and Carla, Artemis and Scott, all friends of Jim and Tina, also accompanied us on the hike! Sundog is extremely knowledgeable about all the different plants in the area and all of there medicinal uses, it was a great hike I learned a lot!

Sundog teaching about the uses of the Agave plant:

As Tina put it, we were a fairly "Motley Crew". It was a fun, odd collection of people! Everyone brought something very unique to the hike! It was also a funny distinction between Guy and I and the rest of the group. Where everyone else was decked out in hiking boots, backpack, wide brimmed hats, with 2 water bottles each and a full packed lunch, Guy and I were in sneakers, with one water bottle each and a bag of peanuts to split that we carried in my drawstring shoe bag. But we did just fine! Ha, I think everyone else just got excited for a big hike, but it ended up being fairly tame!

There was a lovely, but freeezing water hole at the turn around point of the hike.

 Sundog set the tone by stripping down to nothing and jumping in, so Scott, Guy and I followed suit! It was extremely cold water to be skinny dipping in, and Scott and Sundog hurried out as soon as they had hurried in. Once again Guy and I stood out from the crowd. We climbed up high onto some over hanging rocks and started jumping off them, it was very fun! Of the two girls, Artemis and Carla, only Artemis went in the water, but she had a swimming suit. Carla later told Tina that it felt like the scene out of the Diseny movie Mulan, where Mulan, who is masquerading as man in the army to save her families honour, finally gets a moment alone from all the men and his having a bath in the river, enjoying the solitude and serenity, when allll the dudes come charging through, naked, and go jumping in the river! It was a pretty accurate analogy I think.

In other news we have had record highs for the month of October this past week, which means by midday it is cooking at around 95 degrees!

Monday I went with Tina to do some errands. We had to dump the trash trailer at the land fill which was extremely depressing. It was my first time at landfill and I had never truly realized that a landfill is literally a mountain of trash. And to be the actual person who was throwing trash bags out on the dirt was an awful feeling.

After the depressing land fill we went to go pick up the new turkey we bought. They were big turkeys and required a fair bit of wrangling! One of them actually clipped me in the mouth with it's wing and made my lip start bleeding, which isn't actually saying a whole lot considering how dry and windy it is here. But still, it was the first time a bird has drawn blood from me!

On  Tuesday, 10/18, the first leaves started to fall, it was a cool moment to all of the sudden see cotton wood leaves on the ground and realize that even though it's 95 and it doesn't feel like it, that fall is actually on it's way!
On a similar note, in general I feel much more in tune with the cycles of nature since I have been here. For example, since I beat the sun up every morning I notice the change in time that it rises (as well as sets since I am usually still working then as well). Also I have been watching the phases of the moon ever since I got here and it is fun to notice the change in it's rise time as well! I have no real knowledge of the stars or constellations yet, but it is still fun to gaze at them as well as the milky way! Arizona skies can make you feel quite small, in the best possible way of course!!

Tuesday night Jim broke out the aerial shot of the farm and diagrams and projection charts and gave me and Guy a wonderful big picture reminder/update of where he wants the future of the the farm to be headed. He talked with us for about an hour about different plans he had, some as long term as 10 years off. It was a really great talk though and it definitely rekindled some of my passion for being here. I suppose over the last week or two, I slipped into a bit of a mental rut, feeling like I had "seen and done it all". Which of course is not true, but it is a fairly easy mental trap to fall into, yet fortunately, just as easy to get out of! To be clear, it was never a feeling of boredom or resentment, it was just a feeling of routine, and comfortableness. Which to a certain extent is a good thing, I'm grateful chores feel second nature now, and that I can do them rather quickly, and I'm glad harvesting is really easy and fun for me now as well as weeding and planting. But Jim's talk reminded me that we are making moves and steps towards more and more sustainability and regenerative practices each and every day and that although progress is slow sometimes, it is still progress!

After our great talk to cap off a wonderful evening, Jim gave me the backpack that he had promised me, and Oh My goodness it is the prettiest thing you have ever seen! Although it is about 20 years old and has a bullet hole in it, I love the thing! It is an awesome teal color and I will be most excited to travel around Thailand with this beauty on my back! I tried expressing to Jim how grateful I was in words but in the end all I managed was a moment or two of speechlessness and then many "wows" and "thank yous" as he showed me all the ins and outs of the bag and the nifty things it could do!

The next day, today, was a fun day of electric fence set up for me! I spent all morning weed eating around the perimeter and interior of the the fencing making sure no grass was making contact with the fencing and grounding it out, essentially lessening the shocking power of the fence. It was a good solid 4 hours of weed eating! At one point my spindle at the end of the machine got twisted up in some of the line and I immediately shut off the machine and began to unwind the fencing. It was pretty tangled in there and I ended up spending 2 or 3 minutes getting lightly shocked while trying to untangle the mess! It was a odd sensation in my arms. Similarly, When I switched from the perimeter fencing to the interior, where the electric lines were much lower and closer to the grass I was getting shocked pretty often through the weed eater. I didn't realize it at first though because as anyone who has ever operated a weed eater knows, they come along with a certain amount of numbness and heavy vibrations in the arm. But when I switch to the interior fencing I thought at first that I had been hit with a wave of fatigue because my arms were absolutely numb for the first 20 minutes of it. Then I got smart and realized that the metal head of my weed eater had been conducting electricity into my arms for the last 20 minutes!! Although as I mention, the interior fencing was much lower than the perimeter, so even when I was aware, it was still quite difficult to keep the weed eater in the 5 inch margin between the ground and the electricity, so I still ended up getting shocked quite a bit.

I made a new batch of cheese tonight after milking Missy Moo, it is such a cool feeling to be the one that feeds and waters her, milks her, and then makes delicious cheese and butter (which I made Tuesday night) from it, as well as drinking the milk straight! Such a close connection to that animal!

Well, Tina is going through her final Yoga Teacher Immersion Course so I don't get to do any hired out work over the next two days off, but I will be doing chores tomorrow since Jim needs at least some help while she is gone, as well as going to market with him Friday morning, so the streak of "days off" continues! :)

Feel free to email me or leave a comment with any questions!