How Not to Determine If It's Limestone

I said, "Farmer, I think I found the limestone powder you were looking for," and handed him an unlabeled bucket of white powder that had been sitting in the greenhouse.  What did he do?  He looked confused for a second, told me thanks but that wasn't the bucket he was looking for, and then he ATE SOME to see what it was.  Farmer's thanatos instinct appears to be overdeveloped.

Roundup of Ridiculousness

I know I haven't posted in a while, so here are some brief glimpses into farm life of late:

1. In the seven weeks that I've been here, Farmer has been to the grocery store twice.  The first time was on a day when it was pouring rain, and I had to beg him to go grocery shopping by pointing out the (many) items we lacked.  The second time was the other night, when Farmer decided to make lemon bars and realized we didn't have any unsalted butter.  Lemon bars, of course, are an urgent matter, unlike feeding the chickens or watering the crops, so off he went to the supermarket at 9pm.  By the time he got home, he realized it was too late to make the lemon bars anyway, so he made them the next morning.  While I was working.

2. Farmer hasn't been going to farmer's markets to sell things.  To be fair, this doesn't even seem to be about having more time for facebook--we legitimately don't have any vegetables to sell.  Actually, that might be more pathetic than if he were skipping the markets to sit on facebook.  Either way, Farmer pays for space at three farmer's markets for the season and he's been going to one of them.  One day he's going to show up and they'll have given his space to some random busker they've found around the block.

3. Now, I know that this is a farm and things are going to be messy and dirty, sometimes even in the house.  But there should not be mud in the bathtub when I go to take a shower.  Repeatedly.  Mud in the bathtub once?  Fine, you cleaned something off in the tub (I don't necessarily want to know what, or why the hose outside was not the venue, but whatever) and forgot to clean up afterward.  But multiple times? That makes me think it's some sort of house policy.  And that's not even getting into the dog hair that's all over the tub.  I'm pretty sure Farmer showers with his dog.

4. Farmer's Mother counts and analyzes the obituaries in the newspaper every week.  I don't know the specifics, like whether she compares multiple newspapers' obituaries or whether there's some sort of Excel spreadsheet involved, but I know that if you go to dinner at her house on a Monday she'll tell you all about the people who died that week: "60% of them were over 75, 12% had more than three children, five died of loneliness," etc.  The strangest part is that she manages to work this into conversation.  Don't ask me how, because I don't know.  Once the obituary talk has been introduced everything preceding it becomes a kind of blur.  It's like some sort of conversational rufie--you come to and you're smack in the middle of this fucking Albee monologue and you have no idea how you got there, but you feel vaguely violated.  One of these days I'll have to keep my wits about me and figure out how she's doing it.

Don't Feed the Chickens

The chickens aren't laying as many eggs this week--they're down by almost a dozen, in fact.  Farmer thinks it's because the heat is bothering them.  I think it's because he didn't feed them for five days.  Different farming styles, I suppose.

How Not to Irrigate

At my urging, we are setting up an irrigation system.  Mainly because if I had to water one more 500-foot row of anything with a watering can, I was going to kill someone.  This morning we measured out some pipe and, of course, realized it was too short because Farmer never takes care of anything and this pipe has been sitting out in the driveway for over a year, where it probably magically shrank.  (Actually, Other Farmhand #2 tells me that the pipe was hit/run over with the tractor several times during the winter, so some parts of it got damaged and it had to be cut down.  Of course.)  Anyway, around 8:00 this morning we realized there were pieces we needed, and Farmer said he would go to the store and get them.  At 4:30 in the afternoon he finally left to go buy the parts--and the hours in between were not spent outside, I assure you.  So it's now 10pm and there's still no irrigation system.

Incidentally, last week when we started the irrigation project,  Farmer told me that drip lines (thin plastic tubes that you put down along a row of plants so that water can drip out of the tubes and water them) could be found "near the hayfield," to which he pointed vaguely.  I was supposed to get them and lay them out by the rows in the new fields.  Now, I guess I haven't quite caught on yet because when he said this, I pictured the drip lines all in one place, ready to be used.  I mean, I'm not an idiot, I didn't think they were organized neatly or anything crazy like that--I was picturing more of a tangled mess, but at least a tangled mess in one location.  I did not assume that they were stretched out across 500 feet of ground in the fields where they were used last year--fields whose inhabitants were now weeds that came up to my shoulders.  That's exactly where they were, though, and instead of simply sitting on top of the ground, they were buried underneath clumps of dirt and patches of weeds, so I had to rip them up and lay them on top of the weeds and hope I could find them again, and THEN measure them and cut them and drag them to the new fields.  And that, my friends, is how not not to irrigate.

Step Whatever Number: Run Over The Plants With Your Tractor

So normally you think of a tractor as a piece of machinery that helps the farmer cultivate crops.  Or at least I did, until I spent some time here.  Today I bring you two stories of battles between tractor and plant.  And Farmer, who appears to be on the tractor's side.

1. I woke up one morning to find that dozens of the corn plants in our field had been violently severed from their roots.  They lay in the dirt, no longer able to photosynthesize or absorb water or do any of the other things plants like to do.  I was confused, as this didn't seem like the work of a rodent or other animal, and it certainly wasn't an insect or a disease.  Then I remembered hearing Farmer out on the tractor at 10:30 the night before.  You know, when it was dark.  A time when one would be more likely to, say, run over some corn plants.  It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that if he spent more daylight hours tractoring instead of facebooking, that corn would still be intact.

2. Today Farmer had to drive the tractor up over a row of tomatoes in order to secure some row cover* on the eggplants in the next row.  Should be simple, right?  Straddle the row with the tractor so you don't run over any of the plants.  OR, you could do what Farmer did and get distracted (miraculously not by a cell phone, though his talking-while-tractoring rate is alarming.  If he had a smart phone, I'll bet he'd be guilty of facebooking-while-tractoring too) and run over several tomato plants.  He didn't notice until the other farmhand pointed it out to him; Buddhist detachment and Zen-like acceptance, or carelessness and half-assed farming?  You be the judge.  Either way, next time I won't worry about accidentally ripping up some arugula while I'm weeding.

*On the off-chance that you're interested in agricultural technology as well as humorous anecdotes about sad farms: row cover is a breathable, meshy fabric that you put over a row of crops to prevent bugs from eating them or to keep their temperature up so that they grow faster.