Chapter 15: life on the farm always changes and is always the same

I talked to the 'friends' about cooperating on the build-out of the pioneer village. I'd like them to host the parking lot and the coordinating office, and perhaps a building or two where reenactors could demonstrate some of the simpler skills such as candle making, soap making, spinning and weaving.

I planned to pay for the build-outs, so I didn't expect much of a fight from them. These were barren old fields we were talking about, not the active bird nesting or feeding sites. I had yet to build the colonial kitchen and the black smithy. Once we started building the early American facilities, another barn would have to go up with wood and straw in place of concrete mangers. We could reserve the current barn for 'site maintenance' and not allow visitors access. That would give us a place for our granaries, tractor and implements.

Mark talked me into buying a big hydraulic fencepost drill with two heads. One was a standard ten inch diameter. The other was two feet wide! It was for stirring compost piles and digging holes for tree root-balls. We got our orchards in. I helped with the daily watering of the orchards as I knew the first month was critical in establishing the roots.

I made good on my comp-time for Julie. I must admit that I cheated on some of the dinners. I brought in fried chicken, pizza and Chinese take-out. She called me on it, but was grinning throughout.

Come the end of August the twins had their birthday. We bought a cake and I arranged for two fat-tired bicycles for them. I built a feeding station just outside their window. There I installed a manger for hay, a bird feeder and a squirrel feeder. I made it their responsibility to keep them full from the supplies in the barn. It was not an onerous task but I knew that they'd complain after a month or so. I had to remind them that once habituated to finding food there it was their responsibility to keep those animals alive. They watched the tiny deer come to feed with great fascination.

It was September. You know what that means on a farm? Harvest time! The tomatoes had been coming in, and we'd had celery, lettuce and cucumber since mid-August. The radishes were ready and it was time to start canning the tomatoes. I did most of it myself, standing over the boiling bath in my shorts with a great big fan focused on me. I prepped the Mason jars and lids, chopped the fruit and cooked it in the jars until it came up to temperature. Then the lids went on and the jars were set aside. When I had a cart full it went into the root cellar. Each shelf was labeled rather than each jar. I was glad that I'd read that book on pickling, canning and preserving from the Government Printing Office or I'd have screwed it up for sure.

I mixed sweet onions into a few batches of the tomatoes, and oregano as well. I bought sweet pickle brine mix and picked some of the cukes early enough to fit a few into a jar. Finally the melons came in. I was made glad that I'd so thoroughly fertilized the field with decomposed peat. Sweet tomatoes and sweet watermelons: that's the payoff for gardening. The carrots had been coming in regularly. I saved quite a few, as well as the onions, in dry sand piles in the root cellar. The potatoes could wait for the first or second freeze, come early October.