Around the Farm

Its been a busy week here at Schoolhouse Farm! We started the week by harvesting around 125 meat chickens. This is always a tough day but a necessary one. Knowing where your food comes from is extremely important. The understanding on life and death. The fact that death does bring life to us is an amazing concept. Im not sure that I will ever grasp the whole meaning of this. But we now have a freezer full of wonderfully delicious chickens, that lived a great chicken life.

Harvesting chickens is a community effort

We got a new area cleared out and planted a cover crop. This area we hope to develop into pasture with fruit trees and bushes mixed in. It will take a while to get there. We planted pearl millet, buckwheat and sunn hemp as the cover crop. This hopefully will help smother out any unwanted plants. It will also serve to add nutrients to the soil and help attract and feed more pollinators. The next step will be to create swales and plant pioneer trees. We will do that in late winter.

The new cleared area

Another angle of the cleared area

Today we started a much needed barn. This will be a place to store the winter hay and milk the goats. Its not going to be huge or anything just big enough to get the job done. We are using the wood that we had milled last year from our property. It give you that feel of being a pioneer to be using wood that came from your own land.

  

6x6 posts for the barn going up

'Round These Parts

I suppose 'getting settled' time is over. Though, it's hard for me to imagine a time in which our lives will calm back down. We're getting used to our new home, but there is SO much to do, SO many possibilities, it's as though we're riding an endless wave, trying to balance on this boogie board of life.

And Eliza is going through something. Sometimes when you're a parent and you're feeling like the child is out to get you it helps to look at pictures of their smiling face. This struggle will pass, and we'll love each other more at the other end. And...she's so cute.

The big girls are settling so well.
"Mom, I'm glad we moved out here." Naomi says on her way back out the door with a snack for more exploring, "I have all I need."
                                 I beam.
She & Leviah are so comfortable out here; they play in their rain boots nearly every day getting dirty and grimy and gross; is it silly to take pride in the filthiness of your children? 'Cause I am...

And we did get chickens, 4 of them and ducks about a week ago from the Wicked Chicken auction we heard about from our neighbor. It takes every Sunday in Clayton, NC. A truly cultural experience. We have more chicks under the heat lamps right now, but are learning that life on a farm is much more real than the grocery store makes it seem. It's muddy and grimy and cold and dark and sometimes very sad. We are the responsible caretakers and sometimes it's out of our hands--sometimes our hands feel completely incapable when life is on the line. And death. Whew.

These kids are becoming so connected. It's really only a connectedness the farmer-folk can know. A 'circle of life' connectedness--like hold your baby cub above your head on Pride Rock kind of thing. Life is a gift, even in a cat or a chick or a plant. These things don't just happen.

Whew--got a little deeper than I intended, sometimes this 'journaling' gets away from me. But take your kids to a farmer. If they let you take your kids down to see the animals that make their food possible, or out in the gardens to pick a carrot...well, do it. Or be your farmer. Whatever it takes. Losing this 'connectedness' has got to have some influence on the high rates of depression and disillusion people feel. Life is a gift. These things don't just happen.

So that's what's going on at the Grimstead of late. In case you're wondering.