Worcester Woods Farm

Hello there, 
   Well, it’s Tuesday, 9PM, and Bonnie and I just came in from planting up in the field. I was all excited to eat the nice big sandwich I had in the truck, but this is now out of reach because I broke Rule No. 49 of the farm code.
Rule No. 49  Never leave a sandwich in the truck unattended when your Corgi is also in the truck pretending to sleep. 
   So now it is a giant bowl of cereal complimented by the strong odor of bug spray on my clothes, followed by a couple Mike’s Hard Lemonades and a few handfuls of pretzels. Does it matter to you if your farmer is not as organic as the food he produces? Granted, it is a healthier lifestyle than most that he leads, fueled by copious sunshine and rain, fresh meats and vegetables and loads of physical activity, but often the distance and flurry of a 16 hour work day dictate certain practices one is not proud of, nor ashamed of either. I’m all but certain our produce would pass organic certification, but doubt I would myself. Would you? It does not seem improbable that we may one day begin applying a certified “organic” or “green” label upon ourselves to assist in finding the right job, moving into a community or finding our true love on the internet. Think of the opportunities such a document might afford!
   Old Roger Hill says on the radio that it has rained 22 out of the 29 days in June so far. This is probably true, but I haven’t seen too much damage from it. Compared to the last couple years, I would say we are off to a pretty good start. The colder temperatures have prevented some of the warm loving crops from taking off yet, but there is plenty of time left for that. There are hundreds of little zuchinnis on the plants out there that seem cautious of growing any bigger than a finger in the last five or six days.  I was sure last week that we would have them for this week, but nope. Also, one of our greatest foes, the Striped Cucumber Beetle, has been oddly absent until very recently. Usually they are trying to destroy everything I plant in the first week of June, but this year the lack of steady warmth must have kept them down on the beaches in Florida just a couple weeks longer. But now they are home, crawling all over my squash doing the whole “piggyback-copulating” thing. At least they have the decency to do it on the underside of the leaves.
   The last couple days have been stressful. It all started with me popping two tires on the mower and two tires on the truck in about an hour a couple days ago ( It almost takes talent to pull something off like that). Then Bonnie tried to drive to town in the truck and had to turn around because the thing was all over the road. Turns out when I went to transfer a couple tires from the old truck the other day, then got sidetracked, I forgot to tighten the lug nuts on the back tires of the truck. Whoops? Then, yesterday I went out to do my animal chores and found that we had no water. A farm needs water like a skier needs snow. All signs pointed to a burned out well pump. It appeared we had just raised those 225 chickens to pay for a stupid well pump. So I called the guys from Manosh, and they came over and told me I had only raised about 20 chickens to pay for something called a “starting capacitor”.  Whew. Then, when I went down cellar to turn everything back on, I found the basement in about four inches of water. As of this writing, the cause is still fairly unknown, but I am quite certain it is retribution for what I did to the truck and the mower. To top it all off, this morning I had to put down a poor little pig who has been sick for a couple weeks and did not respond to the treatments we gave it. “Shipping Fever” (basically pneumonia) is a common problem for piglets who don’t travel well from the piggery to the farm.  We did our best to make him better, but sometimes there isn’t much that will help. It’s frustrating and disappointing, as well as pretty sad. Sorry pig.
   So hopefully the storm of bad luck and karmic retribution has passed over us and moved on out to sea. The next couple weeks are mostly going to be spent keeping up with the weeds, putting in all the fall brassicas, thinning the tons of carrots, beets and rutabagas popping out of the ground, picking almost a half mile of peas (holy crap), staking and pruning 600 tomato plants, hilling potatoes, trying to eradicate the witch grass taking over in one of our plots, setting up new batches of baby chicks and baby turkeys, moving the pigs to the upper field, trying to consolidate all the piles of composting material I have all over the place, moving a 50’ hoop house over 750 heads of celery, sidedressing the corn, planting cover crops in the early greens beds, building a permanent home for the hens, keeping sandwiches away from Corgis, hitting a few golf balls here and there, spreading our last 16 yards of compost,  burning piles of brush that have been accumulating, picking green beans, cleaning up the yard and a couple hundred other things. I better make a list.
   Hope you all have a good 4^th O’July.