enjoyable work . . .

Now that summer holiday has started, I feel like a child in a candy store.  So many things to look at, wanting so many things, and RUNNING around to make sure to soak up all the store has to offer.  The difference between the child in the candy store and me is that I am not in a candy store, and I am not looking for candy.  But all the same, on the farm, I am "keyed up" like a child with farm maintenance to do, building projects, and highly motivated to WORK.

Work.  I like the verb part of speech of this word. to do work; labor. As well as to be in operation, as a machine. I can hardly call what I do here on our farm work.  Sure, it is labor, sure it does expend energy, sure it is a whole bunch of tiring tasks.  However, when you want something done, and like doing it, it is hard to call it work.  That is what it is like here for me.  A whole lot of ENJOYAB:E work to be done.

Recently we have been getting coffee grounds from one of the coffee shops in town.  I approached them a month or so ago with the idea of having them save all the coffee grounds for us to use here on the farm.  It truly is a win/win situation.  Every two days we get a 5 gallon bucket full of grounds to amend our soil.  In return, they don't have the wet, heavy mess in their trash cans at the shop.  When we get it home we dump it, let it dry, take the filters out, and then mix it with manure for one of our composting methods.

 I also bought a chipper/shredder the other day from a friend.  Nolan and I turned an old stick pile into mulch and are now using the wood chips to mulch around the newly planted fruit trees and raspberry bushes.  This year we planted 6 new fruit trees and 25 raspberry canes.

 On the area where we chipped up all the wood I created an experimental garden.  Here I layed potatoes on the furtile ground and coverd them with some old, wet straw.  I am not going to water them at ALL and see if I get a yeild from it.  It is also right on the edge of the woods.  I'll see how that works out!

 I recently collected and recycled some wood pallets as our main compost bins.  They are not the best ways of composting fro sure, but it is a start for us.  I have been putting our manures in them as well as the grass we collect from the neighbor mowing his 4 acre lawn.  His grass and our animal manure is making us a black, earthy soil amending compound that is going to change our food from good, to GREAT!

 I added another fence to the orchard/garden area and to have a place for the raspberries to grow.  Ildi likes rows and columns. The compromise for me was to have them on a fence IF they had to be put in rows.  The garden is in rows this year as well just to make it easier to work with all the other changes/work we have to do here.  But next year . . . it is going to change!  Nature likes curves.  And nature likes edge.  I am in the process of thinking about how I want to move away from the traditional gardening methods of plants put in rows to the way nature causes things just to be "planted."