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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘dumb farmer’

Did Not Fly the Coop

The wind is still freight-training, so I’m not sayin’ we’re in the clear, but I did wake up three times last night to peer out of the window to see if the chicken coop (which is mounted on the running gear from an old haywagon) was still upright, and it was, and is now in the daylight.  I was worried, because when I was in there at dusk, she was just a-rockin’.  It was parked broadside to the wind and the rain had left the ground too soupy to move it.  So, as the blurry rain-whipped cellphone photo below demonstrates, I took measures…

That’s a ground anchor, a boomer, and the chain from my deer-skinner.

Thank You, Neighbor

One of the reasons I can be out on book tour talking about “my” farm is because I have neighbors like Tom here, who for the second year in a row has come up the hill with his John Deere 620 to break sod for me.  Man, how neat to see that earth roll over for the first time in 25 years, and also to hear the deep pop-pop-pop of that tractor lugging at the traces.

&$#@$

Spent an afternoon stacking wood.  Not well, apparently.  Because when I took my daughter out to show her the progress made (she has a vested interest), I heard a tick…tick…tick noise.  She was leaning into the doorway visible in this photo.  When I heard the ticking, I realized it was the sound of the woodpile shifting.  “You better back up – I think the pile might fall,” I said, and no sooner had I said it than the entire row came avalanching down and spilling out the doorway.  Just missed her.

This is just a fraction of the wood that fell.  The rest is inside the shed.  Took a photo of that, too, but didn’t post it because it didn’t look all that dramatic.  Just looked like a jumble of firewood.  That has to be stacked.  Again.

Chicken on Wheels

Once upon a time I wrote a book about (among other things) building a chicken coop:

Now we have a new project in the works…

Oats Notes

We planted oats on a long-fallow patch this spring.  The neighbor was kind enough to plow the sod, then I tilled it and used a simple shoulder-slung broadcaster to spread the seeds.  Didn’t have a cultipacker so I settled for dragging the whole works with a bedspring hooked behind an ATV.  The oats came up great, and it was a pleasure to gaze at them all summer, especially when they began to head out – such a soothing color, that milky green.  They’re golden now, and yesterday I started harvesting them.

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What’s the Thread Count on that Tarp?

Some time ago when metrosexuals were all the rage I did a story that never got published.  The premise involved a magazine having me fly pretty much straight from 10 days of northern Wisconsin deer hunting – windburned, stubbled, and with dried deer blood under my nails – to an extremely high-tone New York City hotel, where I then spent two or three days being scrubbed, trimmed, and toned.  I did it all – manicure (two, actually — the deer blood, y’know), pedicure, straight razor shave with warm shaving cream, several different facials, an $80 dollar haircut (nice enough fellow, lots of rapid snipping, but when it was over I gotta say you couldn’t tell it from the ol’ DIY electric clippers buzz cut), eyebrow “shaping” (think of being attacked in the eyebrow region by a rabid woodpecker — lots of tears, but when it was over, for the first time in my life I had two eyebrows) (lasted for about a week).

Anyways.  I am off track.  Point is, as part of the story the magazine had me stay at a hotel that was over the top tony.  That experience was a whole ‘nother story for some other time.  I bring it up for this post only to ask, do you think a place with “Frederic Fekkai signature bath amenities” and “Frette linens” and “Fully Equipped Deluxe Poggen Pohl Kitchens in every Suite“ (I got the Fekkai and the Frette, but sadly did not stay in a suite, so no Poggen Pohl) ever reckoned a sheet from one of their bedside notepads would make a trip to Farm & Fleet?

Notepad from the Alex Hotel

Swine A-Snoozing

First night we had the pigs, it rained.  A fairly cold rain.  Since this was also the first night the pigs had ever spent outdoors, I worried they wouldn’t know to go in the hutch.  So at around midnight I went out to check, and sure enough they were all stacked up against the outside of the hutch, getting soaked.  One by one I carried them inside the hutch (a big plastic silo cut in half).  Due to the rain, mud and pigginess of the task, when I was done I headed straight for the laundry room and then the shower.  But I slept well knowing they had been tucked under a roof.  And I was rewarded in the morning when I went out to check on them.  First of all, I could hear the snoring (seriously) from twenty feet away.  And then when I poked my head through the door, I was greeted by this sight:

Pigs Snoozing