Sometimes we get reminded

Last week Wendy and I went shopping. Not for clothes, and not directly for food. We have just about run out of pigs. Business is good, but the real reason is that our porkers had a bad winter. We lost several of what we call junior pigs during our coldest nights. Pigs literally pile up to stay warm, and unfortunately the big ones occasionally end up at the top of the heap (they are, after all, a lot like humans). Combined with a spate of vulture attacks on newborn litters, our inventory has been drawn down.
So after conversations with our steady customers, we got permission to fill in when we need to with "outsourced" pork, and off we flew to the local friendly sties. I had found a phone number on our local swap and shop web site, and got directions to Jeff's house.
I arranged for us to meet Jeff on Saturday, two weeks ago, so like a good pig shopper I called him the Thursday before. He answered his cell, and I asked if we were still on for Saturday. His reply startled me. He said "I'm on the way home from Nashville. A tornado just went through my farm and I've got to see what's left."
We were out working in the field, in full sunshine at the time, and Jeff lives less than 20 miles from us, so we beat feet to the house and turned on the weather channel. It was unbelievable. Our neighboring county and the north end of Giles county were right in the path. I waited a couple of days and called Jeff back. He said it wasn't too bad at his farm, that he had "only" lost his roof, one barn and part of another, that a lot of his neighbors had been hit harder.

To make a long story even longer, we arranged our shopping trip for Saturday, April 19. Wendy and I drove up the long hill from Campbellsville to his house, through as beautiful and idyllic scenes as you will ever see. I think we saw every shade of green possible, all reflecting bright sunlight. It was as pretty a day as I can recall. Then we got to the top of the hill and the scene changed abruptly. I had seen tornado videos, but I guess I have never actually driven or walked through areas that had been hit. After a week it still was raw and stark. Piles of rubble marked home and church sites, and assortments of things were strewn everywhere. Jeff's house was more or less intact, with a blue tarp for a roof, but the barn less than 100 feet away had been taken down to the concrete foundation. It had been an Amish barn, and help 6,000 bales of hay.
We parked, got out, and I noted that there was not a lot of activity, especially odd given that there were 7 Amish buggies parked in the yard, and horses tethered nearby. I wandered over and found a group of 20-25 men and boys, all dressed in traditional Amish blue, all eating lunch with little conversation and lots of gusto. They weren't interested in talking to me, so I went to find Jeff. We looked at his pigs, then went to a neighbor's house and did the same. When we got back to Jeff's, the crew were all over the barn foundation, hammers in hand. Some of the younger ones were perched 20 feet up on posts, nailing beams into place. We sat and watched for a few minutes, and Jeff started talking. He said that the mornng after the storm, his Amish neighbors started showing up. The adults sorted through piles of lumber and tin, stacking the reuseable neatly, while the children pulled nails out. No one had called them (they don't have phones), no one had asked them to come, and no one had hired them. They are neighbors. All they asked was how he wanted the barn re-built. In less than a week they had cleaned up the debris, salvaged everything still usable, re-built the foundation and started on the barn itself. He held his hands as far apart as he could reach, and said "It makes my heart feel like it's this big."
We're going back this Saturday to load pigs and to see a real neighborhood again. One of my first thoughts was that I'd like to move up there and be a part of them. I think this shopping trip won't be the only one we'll be making to that community. It moved something very deep in both of us.

The Crazyness Gets Crazier

Whoever convinced everyone that a farm is a laid back, bucolic place to relax, chew on a straw, go fishing, and just be lazy obviously never saw or visited a farm. It's crazy. Not some of the time, all of the time, and then some more. Our craziness has gone into overtime. Here's a typical time slot:
Get up before dawn, make coffee, wash the milking equipment, get dressed. Feed hogs, milk cows, strain milk, rinse containers. Feed quail, chicks and chickens. Wolf down breakfast (thanks to Wendy, we at least all get breakfast). Then go chase sheep out of the neighbor's pasture. Some of us go to the greenhouse - it gets watered 3 times daily right now - while others go to the field. School starts for the kids at 9, but is usually delayed while we chase sheep out of the hay field. Mulching, manuring, weeding, planting, plowing, tilling, and maybe a wee bit of harvesting are interspersed with school, and chasing sheep out of the crops. Did you know that one sheep times 2 days can take a quarter acre of kale down to ground level? Neither did we until recently.
There's always fence to be built or repaired. Some of the fences are vintage 1950. They qualify as genuine antiques, but nobody is buying. And the sheep don't care. You'd think they would appreciate something that is as old as me, but I guess I should know better. They don't respect the fences any more than they respect me. The problem is getting some better. All the ones I can identify as repeat offenders are given a free one way ticket to the butcher.

All this takes us up to and through the lunch hour. You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I've forgotten what lunch is for. I think it's punctuated by chasing sheep from somewhere to somewhere else. Come to think of it, I guess the solution has been staring me in the face all along. I just need to figure out where the sheep want to be, and take them there. Problem is, they are so fickle.

Things are growing very slowly this spring. I thought it had been a warm March, but the fact is, it's been the coolest one for some years. What lulled me to sleep was the fact that we've had very little truly cold weather this spring; we've just had very little warm weather, either. Just this week is it warm enough for things to take off and grow. I can tell that, because where we had tiny peas last weekend we have giant weeds now. Where we had greens showing through, we have grass now. Oh well, at least something is growing. Maybe if I let the sheep in to graze?

Not all of the news is bad. The blackberries appear to be coming back after last year's late freeze. Some of the fruit trees didn't survive, but the blackberries, a few raspberries, and some of the strawberries that we feared were gone have come back. It's too early to tell whether they'll fruit this year or not, but at least they came back. And the chicks that survived our bout with wormer-resistant parasites are laying eggs. We lost over 150 of the 200 layers we had nurtured over the winter. In desperation we fed them diatomaceous earth, and it worked. They appear to be hale and hearty. The sheep are looking at them hungrily, though. Thank goodness sheep are not carnivores.

I'll update crops at least weekly. Right now I need to go -you guessed it. I haven't run nearly enough yet. I hear sheep noises from the wrong direction. Lamb chops, anyone?