Midnight Farmers: Reflections On Know-Nothings

"Its at times like this *grunt* that I remind myself *huff* that I am not *grunt* a farmer." Daddy said this this evening as he was lifting the heavy barrel of the "T-Bar Ground Injector" up and down on a T-post. It was our 8th of 10 that we drove this evening.

We are reminded daily that we know practically nothing about "farming." I use the term loosely because there are farmers and then there are farmers. We're not farmers, we're just farming. Kind of. If you count 11 watermelon plants and 14 chickens farming. There are only 14 chickens now- remember, we used to have 15? We have no idea why that chicken died.

But, what's to be expected? We've only been here 7 months and only knew about this place for a year. We're excited to learn, though! So, what's been happening here this summer? Since getting rid of my Facebook, y'all are probably desperate to hear about the episodes that keep life interesting.

Or maybe you aren't.

But I'm going to share some anyway. If I can remember them. :P

Emma's been tending our berry patch. Back in May (?) we spent a few days digging two huge ditches,er, trenches,er, holes, er... and filling it back in with compost and rotting wood and planted 6 berry plants- 3 raspberries 3 blackberries. Emma faithfully drags three hoses up the hill to water them by hand about 3 times a week when it doesn't rain. Before we had 3 hoses, she would walk up and down the hill with a watering can. And up and down. And up and down. And up and down. Poor girl would sometimes be out in the dark finishing up. But she didn't complain- and I wouldn't have either- because TN summers at night are magical---really, truly, positively amazing. Two different sets of fireflies come out and shine so bright and so thick it looks like the everything is sparkling. It makes you stop and take a deep breath and just take a moment to love what you are feeling, seeing, smelling.

Just don't stand by a light and breathe in deep. You'll be blowing bugs out of your nose all night.

Anyway, the raspberries all died. :( But the blackberries are growing, and we got one berry this week!

Willa has been taking care of the chickens. She feeds and waters them everyday, and alerts us when we're about to run out of chicken feed. Except one time she forgot until all the errands had already been run, so she and I went on my first driving-with-a-license outing. --(You know, I always thought that the first thing I would do after getting my license would be something like going to the movies or ice cream with friends or shopping, but no... the first place I went was the co-op with my sister to get chicken feed. Oh how far I've fallen.)--

We've also had major discussions over how much feed to give them. And whether or not to take the advice of Daniel, our chicken-raising friend. In case you are wondering, we always take his advice.

Except when he starts talking about flame-weeders and how we need one.

I, Olivia, have been "garden girl" or "veggie lady" or "weed woman." Somehow I sorta took over the gardening... and, well.... its doing better than we've ever done with a garden. But that's not saying much, since in Wheeling we didn't do anything but plant tomatoes, stake them once, leave them for 2 months and then send Willa out to gather colander fulls. We'd harvest the annoying Rhubarb every year and get sick from all the sugar in the rhubarb crisp, and occasionally we'd get a crop of peppers that were tasty.

But here, we decided to go BIG. Like... 8 (?) times larger than our previous garden. We have 40 sweet potato, 32+ tomato, 8 pepper, 3 cantaloupe, 3 zucchini, 3 squash, 6 bean, 11 cucumber, 11 garlic, 15 pumpkin, and 11 watermelon plants. I won't bore you with stories of squashing squash bugs, exploding horn worm pesto, disappearing garlic, and demon weed. Although I will tell you about the fence we put up this evening.

You see, Daddy had the forethought to purchase deer fencing for our garden even though we'd never seen deer on our land. The story of how it took Daddy and me 6 hours to drive to a town 45 minutes away, take down the fencing in the dark in an hour, and then get home is a grand ole' tale, but I won't go into details now.

Just this week we noticed the tops of the tomatoes being eaten, so this evening we decided to put up the fence. We only had 10 T-posts to go around about 280 ft (?), so we had to stretch the fence pretty hard to make it stand. And, guess what? It got dark on us this evening. But man, was it pretty outside! After the sun had gone behind the hill but everything was still light, a thunderstorm cloud could be seen on the far side of the valley- it wasn't anywhere close, but we could see it with great clarity. Then it started lightning. We'd look up from pulling a weed and see a gorgeous pink streak shoot across the gray cloud. Eventually the whole cloud would light up in a pink array about every 30 seconds. We could see the moon and stars and white fluffy clouds above us. It was another stop, breathe deep, and just love what you're seeing right now moment.

This was punctuated by an amazing treat- the International Space Station passed right overhead as bright as could be for a full two minutes.

We were thankful for the T-Post Driver lent to us, and gained a new appreciation for someone having to do a lot more of those. Especially since the alternative to the Driver was me standing in our wheeled cart with a hammer and pounding on the T-Posts while trying not to fall or break the hammer (like I did to stake the tomatoes.) :D

(Bruce writing now): Speaking of T-Posts, we jokingly referred to the T-Post Driver as the T-Post putter-inner all day saying we needed to borrow one of those thingys from someone. Its basically an enclosed heavy steel pipe. with handles. Think bazooka. We finally decided on calling it a ground injector device. Upon borrowing it from the Lingo family, Phillip told us that we needed to provide our own power. Tina asked in all seriousness if we had enough gas. I told her with a wink towards the kids not to worry, that we had plenty of fuel (having just finished dinner).

So we called ourselves the midnight farmers because we would rather work late into the night than get up early to complete a task. You see, it is incredibly hot for our northern bones outside during the sunshine hours, so dark is a great time to work--- except for the bugs and the fact that you can't see. :P

Well, I would love to share more (and there's a ton more!) but it is nearly tomorrow, so I must skedaddle off to bed.