Chapter 5

Note—a colloquial name for Kentucky-distilled bourbon is 'Kentucky Sunshine'

Our seedlings were growing well in the forcing house. We improvised a theodolite with a dinky little laser, a compass and a cheap rifle sight mounted on a decent tripod. Our target was a mocked-up little disco ball on a stick. I printed out the journal ring on my laser printer and had it professionally encased in plastic as one part of a go-to-town-and-get-everything-done trip. Other farmers will be nodding their heads at that, I'm sure. Townies impulse buy while farmers make lists.

I'd taken some time to watch our traffic flows, noting who went where how many times to get things done. I determined that distributing the chest freezers was a mistake. Wendy and her team were running all over hell and had to find people to get access to their houses. It was a mess. We had five houses, each with six chest freezers. We talked it over at supper. We'd leave one freezer in each house with their chosen selections and move the rest into the communal dining room. It had a sheltered runway to the industrial kitchen. We moved twenty five mostly filled chest freezers. Thank god for the end loader and pallet attachment. Moving those in the rain and mud by hand would have been miserable if not impossible.

We made Josh fess up as to where that border collie pup came from. We lucked into a spring litter. They weren't ready to wean yet but we played with 'em after getting the OK by mom and dad. We pre-paid for the whole litter of ten. We wanted one per household and the rest for the widows and orphans to have. We'd be back in a month to get them checked out by the vet and take them home.

We got the fence pulled off of our compost pile but left it covered so it wouldn't turn to soupy mud in what was left of the rains. The tractors had their oil changed and got greased up. I checked the fuel-line water traps and emptied them. They started fine so I didn't worry about the plugs. We had one mid-sized and two smaller tractors, four short hay wagons and two planting/harvesting carts. The three-foot pig-wire frames to support the tomato hills were ready, all lined in black visqueen with open bottoms.

I started my way around the neighbors, harvesting their manure piles for a hundred bucks a piece, those that would sell. The ground was too wet to plow yet so I just piled it up where the orchard was going to be. Whatever we didn't scrape back up would go to good use.

The tree shipment came in. We scrambled to find a place to put them near where the orchard would be yet out of the way. They were barely budding so we laid them over at an angle so that we could get to the root balls to keep them moist.

It always seems like everything happens at once, doesn't it?

The ground finally dried enough to work with, i.e. the tractors wouldn't sink into the ground. Traditional tractors have one or two itty-bitty front wheels in the center which sink into soft ground like crazy. The tractors we had boasted two great big tires in front that tracked in the same paths as the rear, driving wheels. We got the humus delivered and spread then laid on the composted manure pile material. The truck garden field got an even covering but the sugar beets, orchard, tomatoes and potatoes got special treatment. The sugar beets and orchard got fertilized in strips where the plantings would be. The potato hills and tomato hills got their structures filled with mixed humus and composted manure pile so that the food would go where it was needed, not all over hell. We were learning. With the increased number of hands to do the work we weren't killing ourselves, but we sure slept good until planting was over. Everything got cleaned up and the watering regimen began. We held off on planting the clover until all the necessary hand planting was done. It seemed more time-efficient that way. After all, we weren't after clover production, we were after nitrogen fixation in the root nodules. We got the hunting blinds out and started our morning/evening hunting shifts again.

I reminisced what life was like back at Transy in the 70's. We were a bunch of well-educated pot-heads. I borrowed the lights from the forcing shed and built up some planting beds In the packing shed. A little note to a friend of mine in the military, now stationed in Germany, got me several variants of pot seeds. They travel well wrapped in cotton and packed in film canisters. I began experimenting with growth conditions of cannabis. I must admit that the first generation or three left a lot to be desired.

Much research was done using Tor for security. Tor wraps all your network traffic in an encrypted shell and sends it to one of several servers, then sends it on to another server, then sends it on to a portal server that connects anonymously to the site you wanted to visit. I learned a lot about growing pot and customizing the environment for maximum resin yield. It was a dedicated branch of farming concerning a specialized cultivar. It was quite specific information customized towards a tailored yield. Fascinating stuff. The power demands were covered by the rest of the farm. I spent many a day raising green bliss.

It seemed stupid to water the trees with potable (drinkable) water when all that lake lay right there. I bought 50 feet of steel pipe. We buried it 10 feet past the edge of the water. Just inside our fence line I put in a pad where the pipe came up. We put in a 1-and 1/2-inch centrifugal water pump that would hook to a tractor's PTO (power take off). From there we used canvas nursery hose to get the water to the orchard. We watered every morning but didn't turn it into a swamp. You had to watch it to know when to cut it off. We used two people and radios, one to move the hose around, one to cut on and off the PTO, hence the pump.

We planted the trees with too much room between them, really. We planted on 28 foot centers. My rationale was that they'd get more sunlight. We'd have to keep them trimmed back, but we would anyway to keep the branchings complex. Dad once told me about putting washed iron filings and borax under an old apple tree which split itself in two bearing fruit the next year. We added a little each year, not much.

We were feeding people pasta, red sauce, rabbits, butter, milk and eggs. Some cheese went out—cottage cheese, cream cheese, farmer's cheese and sour cream. The Deadericks were selling beef, butter and milk. We sold wheat flour with instructions on how to make scratch pancakes—sourdough pancakes don't need baking powder, just a little of the 'mother' and taste fine. I ought to know, I ate enough of 'em.

Our mushrooms weren't bearing as much as the previous year. It was time to replenish the growth media. We got out our tired-looking notebooks from last year and located the oak trees we'd prepared. They'd rotted down pretty well but still had some spine. We used the end loader with the pallet fork attachment to get the most of it, then just scooped up the rest onto our hay wagon that was pressed into service. It was shovel work clearing out the caves and shoveling in the new base. It got watered a few times then we shook spores from the gills of mature mushrooms over the prepared beds. We then left them alone for a couple weeks. It worked.

Good thing. I'd get kind of crabby without my hot sausage and mushroom pizza on Fridays! I knew that I wasn't alone, either.

We asked the widows if they wanted to go back to town now that the winter was over. Not a one took us up on it. They had single-family homes, good security, were well-fed, had heat and light and the work was not only bearable but gave them some respect. Their kids loved it on the farm too. There were enough woods to keep them out of everyone's hair and enough interesting things to do and watch to keep from being bored. We had a couple apprentice cheese makers and cooks. Everyone seemed to throw in and get the chores done.

I took a long look at our hedges. They were getting leggy and not really filling in. I bought a big gas-powered hedge trimmer with a frame that fit my shoulders. I respected those thorns all too well. I bought into a pair of pants designed for lumbermen and chain saw work. A face mask, my Carhartt coat and a pair of heavy leather gloves had me in business. I had one of the kids keep up with me with a small tractor and cart with gas, oil and drinking water on it as I went as I went along. I topped the hedges by four inches all the way around and trimmed the side sucker back. It took a couple weeks to complete but not much else was happening.

I got the flats of ladybugs ordered for the whole place and the chickens were being let loose during the day into the truck garden and around the tomatoes. We kept plowing and seeding until we had thirty five acres in clover. We had some broad stretches all tied together but some, like the tomatoes, potatoes and yams were in separate fields with forest and pasture between the areas. I'd read up on organic farming best practices enough to know that we wanted differentiated green belts between our fields that were row-cropped and ones that laid fallow or were planted in clover each year. We had to move our crops from field to field changing the field ecologies to screw with the insects. I wanted to look into keeping honeybees for honey and ordering lacewings and praying mantises for insect control, respectively.

Even though the used mushroom bedding had a lot of the minerals and food value removed we wanted its soil-aerating properties. We mixed it with sand and more digested cowshit. This was spread over two small fields and worked it in. We planted strawberries and black raspberries, all in rows so that the tractors could keep them watered. Those crops wouldn't move so we'd have to keep an eye on the insects with traps and occasionally spread carnivorous bugs to keep things under control.

We bought 33 pregnant sows along with 16 milking shorthorns. We learned to keep the dogs away from the cows or they'd run the poor things all over the pasture. It took some but we trained a couple to protect the herd, not drive it. The rest quickly learned. The dogs were growing fast. They were smart and affectionate. They kids loved 'em to death.

My ladies were showing their bumps. So were a couple of the others. Harvest time was going to be interesting around here. We'd have to start the next crop of kids to come due after the frost.

We had the time so we started putting in flowering trees between the houses as well as ornamental bushes over the mushroom farms and the root cellars (which were between the houses). For some reason I really liked the Surinam Cherry with its white fragrant flowers and deep green foliage so we planted that around our house. Some liked dogwood, some liked flowering vines. The widows planted flower beds in front of their places. Soon we saw bachelor's buttons, roses, lupines, daisies, iris, marigolds, lavender and chrysanthemums. Everyone had their own idea as to what made up a nice garden. We had friggin' marigolds everywhere. I figured out later that our teachers got all the wee ones into planting their own little beds around the pole barns.

I got my herb garden going again with plenty of humus and plenty of fertilizer. One side was sandy, the other not. I experimented to see which side did better under each species.

I planted bay laurel in big red flower pots as they don't like temps much under freezing and this way we'd be able to bring them inside after the frost to winter over. I planted chives, oregano, sage and parsley. To some people cilantro tastes like soap. I'm one of them. I had a bodacious dill colony going but the sage plants were kind of weak. You win some, you lose some. We couldn't raise oranges, much less bitter orange, (for the peel and to make marmalade) but this was peach country. Next year I wanted to put in a separate peach orchard. I can still close my eyes and taste a sun-warm ripe peach parting between my teeth, the juice running down my chin. The aroma is delicate yet full bodied. Truly tree-ripened peaches aren't acidic at all. they're--luscious. It's a true gustatory symphony. Don't even TALK to me about pears twisted right off the tree, warm and so sweet that you have to fight off the wasps. Oh, god. It trickles down your throat like liquid gold. You want a reason to live? Grow pear trees. God shall smile upon your endeavors. I shit you not.

I remember my grandfather's house. The place was surrounded by lilacs. The perfume in the spring was truly amazing. The neighbor's peony bushes gave a heady yet full scent that lasted for over a month. She had rhubarb planted over her old coal ash pit that was sweet, sweet, sweet. I so loved a rhubarb and sugar compote. To fill a pie with it or top a vanilla sundae made this kid's summer days. Of such things are memories made of. We started a big row of rhubarb, fertilized and well-limed.