Posts Tagged ‘dumb farmer’ | Next Page ⇒  

If the weather has allowed, my buddy Mills and I will be spending the bulk of the day ripping out brush and junk in preparation for a rather behemoth fencing project intended to result in putting some of our long-abandoned pastures back beneath some beef.

If you’re trying to pull up one of those step-in fence posts and it just won’t budge, no matter how hard you grunt and heave, umm, check to make sure you’re not standing on the step-in.

Regarding the state of my agricultural endeavors: For Father’s Day, my tots gave me a gift labeled “Dad’s Favorite Fencing Tool.”

Inside the wrap was a packet of bungee cords.

Planted a patch of oats where the pigs were last year.  Got some amazing oats…nearly shoulder high and deep green.  Unfortunately they’re infested with pigweed (lamb’s quarters?) that is equally green and head-high.  Hand-pulling it to salvage the oats.  Leaves a patchy-looking mess but better than giving up entirely, which I was prepared to do until my wife jacked me up.

We have two other patches of oats planted on land that hadn’t been tilled for 25 years.  It’s paler and a tad stunted, but relatively weed-free.  Old-timer across the way says that’ll change next year when the weed seed gets to the tilled ground.  We’re going to try to do some preventative fall planting.

We like the oats because I cut it stem and all and we feed it to the chickens all winter.  They turn it into food, bedding, and eventually, mulch.

Field corn is doing well for the most part.  Our first year of that.  Best patch is the one my wife and daughter weeded while I was gone.  I cultivated nearly all of it before I left on book tour.  Just used a small rear-tine tiller.  Got too rainy to finish, and when I came back after two weeks away, it was remarkable to see the difference between the cultivated and uncultivated corn.

A while back I talked about pigs with Yael Grauer of the food magazine Spezzatino.  The entire interview is available here as a downloadable .pdf.  Yael asked some good questions that led the conversation off into a few less-common corners.