Not About The Drudgery

Fourteen chickens are on the loose. They haven’t been effectively penned for over a year. The eggs they lay in the old cast iron stove have pretty shells and orange yolks.

The farm dog has a two storey house on the back porch. The insulated room is for cold weather, the bed on top for the ultimate watchdog experience. The back porch is his, and he permits us to visit.

The chickens, like the gleaners they are, got in his space and ate his food and they are not permitted to visit anymore. They come by every morning, checking to see if Diesel mightn’t be out of town today. Sometimes he’s gone on important business and the bravest chickens jump up to check his dish. They brag in a bird brained way about the food, and their personal bravery. Diesel comes storming in, a hundred pounds of terror and teeth, and the chickens flee.

If he ever hurts them it’ll be by accident. He has a remarkably tender conscience and a soft mouth, in regards to anything I ask him to take care of.

This is the dog who found a nest of week-old kittens and brought them to my daughter one by one. He apologized abjectly about the dead one— I think it wasn’t his fault. It had been dead for some time. The mama was Jemima, the cat we gave to Diesel as a kitten, explaining that he needed to take care of her. He adopted her, and her kittens are his own dear grandchildren.

Yesterday my son said he found Jemima’s current kittens in the barn. Jemima came to get petted while the eight-week-old kitten watched. She went back to him, spoke to him reassuringly, and led him back to my son.

We hadn’t been able to find these babies since Jemima took them away from Diesel’s doghouse at three days old. We’d fixed them up in there because she had them at a place where they weren’t protected from the chickens, and I will never trust chickens around unattended babies of any kind.

We thought maybe the kittens were in a brush pile, and my daughter went out to find them because we wanted to light the pile on a rainy day. She couldn’t find the kittens, but she did find a mallard’s nest with seven eggs. She brought them into the kitchen and nested them on the counter in the heating pad, with my meat thermometer. I objected strenuously— I sincerely believe we wouldn’t give baby mallards a sufficient education— and she returned them to the brush pile, but the damage was done. To her grief, and also the ducks’, the ravens found the nest and murdered the babies, like the murderers ravens are.

Good news, though. The ravens haven’t murdered any calves yet this year.

The red baldy bull calf the vet delivered a week ago is doing well. I last saw it on Tuesday, (the cattle are not my regular work,) and it was nested beside its mother, with only its head visible above the grass. It has exceptionally big and attentive ears.

I went out at sundown that night to check a cow my son said was in labor too soon. I found she’d had preemie twins, too preemie to live. I missed the birth by about twenty minutes, I think, but I couldn’t have made a difference anyway. I pulled the poor little things to the edge of the pasture so they wouldn’t get stepped on, and left the cow licking them in a sad way. (“A sad solemn way,” says my six year old, who is reading over my shoulder while I write.”)

“And write that her afterbirth is still hanging out,” he says. “But there’s a shot we can give her and it will fix it.”

“Really? Yesterday was the third day. She’s got to have oxytocin this morning. The vet says that needs to be treated at three days.”

Last Saturday my husband and our two oldest sons took the new red plywood boat downriver to the island where we pasture cattle in the summer. They spent the morning scowing another guy’s cattle over to the island, and came back decided to take most of ours down in a few weeks. We’ll keep only the ones that need attention at home, like the late calvers and the unintelligent yearling, and let the home pastures grow for late fall grazing.

The custom planting has been moving along this week. I see on the op-center that they’ve planted 797.6 acres in 43 fields since noon Monday, and they are moving along at 17.7 acres an hour. They’ll get rained out about noon today but they’d finish if the weather held. That close. And nobody’s worked more than a 24-hour day all week.

This is good news to be almost finished, because next week there’s silage to make. It’s been a really cold, wet May and my husband has been strategizing how to run a silage crew while still planting corn, but… maybe not.

In the garden, I have some pretty good salad going on, all washed and ready to go. There’s spinach that overwintered under the snow, still producing. The black seeded Simpson lettuce in the greenhouse is a thick ground cover with little tomatoes and basils inserted. The spinach in the other half of the greenhouse will be ready in a week or so, when we need it. We have chives and pansies and skinny volunteer garlic and oregano and rhubarb and tiny prunings from this year’s herbs. I’ve been taking my salad bowl, with the dressing in the bottom, out to the garden and coming back with a salad ready to serve. This thin Simpson lettuce is okay with a vinaigrette: one tablespoon each of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and maple syrup with a dash of salt and pepper.

The pansies in the salad are fun. My son —the one who likes new foods— says “oh yeah, nice. They taste like flowers.”

I smoked a barbecue pit full of bacons this week. Couldn’t get them all in, but they were too fatty to make into anything else. (Note to self: don’t feed the hogs an extra month just because you can’t agree how to get them butchered.) This bacon cured in the basement fridge for about a month and I worried it wouldn’t be any good, but it is good. Is it ever good. Well, anyway, as long as I’m wanting bacon grease, it’s good. I’m going to make another batch of baked beans as soon as I’m finished writing.

The last two bacons, cured but unsmoked are frozen until cooler weather. They’ll have to wait.

My son, the one who likes raising pigs, set up a new pen outside and is expecting his new weanlings to come today. They’ll have a shelter, and a big square bale of corn stover, and all the fresh air in the world.

As far as I can tell, none of the hens have gone broody. I think some of them are hiding their eggs, but it seems like none are missing like they would be if they were sitting. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe a proud chicken will come out of the weeds, one of these days, with a bunch of baby roosters.