Hot and Hazy, not a cloud in the sky all day. The temperature stuck in the low 80Fs.
I got right to it this morning-- grabbed my hoe and ran across to the onion fields. Bah had caught up on his row and started a second. Yesterday I was under the impression that we were close to finishing: I was wrong. We hacked and pulled away at the weeds all the way to lunch.
During lunch I kicked around the store chatting with the boss. Lucy had a meshed cast on her forearm-- the boss found her yesterday with a big v shaped gash. Its not clear whether she was bit or jumped into trouble somewhere. The conversation turned to the subject of cows: for the time being the herd has been split in half-- those who have calved and their young ones in the big fields, then those who haven't calved grazing in the fields near the boss's brother's house. It'll be easier this way to keep tabs on any new births. Any cow is a hassle, they usually escape the fence once or twice a summer-- calves are only more difficult.
The boss told me that years ago a calf just up and disappeared over a weekend. Finally, a full day later, he received a call from a local elementary school-- the calf was there munching the front lawn. The foreman had to chase down the little guy and wrestle her into the van. We talked more about the delivery process and cows eating their afterbirth. A week ago when driving home I saw a cow waltzing about the pasture dragging a good ten feet of afterbirth behind. --Right around this point in the conversation a woman ran into the store. Sure enough, one of the calves had escaped and was wandering in the street.
I ran down and found NYU already sitting in the middle of the road pinning the calf between his legs-- cars line up on all sides. He got the calf out of the street and I waved the cars on. Between the two of us we got the calf back through the gate without anymore problems-- though the mother herd was a bit riled up. When the woman from the store drove by her car spooked the calf, and it bolted right between the barbed wire fence.
The crisis ended, I took a long lunch then joined Bah back in the onion field. We finished up and headed over through the blueberry fields and started weeding more beds of swiss chard and broccoli. When we took a water break Bah showed me his growing collection of hawk feathers he found in the fields. He has four long striped red tail hawk feathers-- he keeps them all jabbed standing up in the cracks of a lone fence post by the road.
I hadn't even finished hoeing one row of chard when the foreman shouted me over to his tractor and we rode up to the secret wooded field. I had never been up to this part of the farm, its a plateau not quite as high up as the orchard hill top surrounded by thick woods on all sides. It is big, easily the size of the lower fields all together. The foreman had prepared several rows, so we laid down 3 rows worth of drip line-- we only went 2/3rds the way down the row as things tend not to grow in tree shadows. The tractor had the plastic lay-er all hitched up, and we wrapped the 3 rows with surprising ease.
The boss walked up and the three of us had a sit down. We're planning to plant summer squash and zucchini by the woods edge-- so the boss explained all the details. Further in-field we're eventually doing to lay down a ton of cucumbers-- using a few new techniques the boss learned at a friend's farm. For the cucumbers- seeds will be laid straight in the dirt in one long row, but on either side 4 feet of plastic wrap will line the length. The cucumber vines will creep across the plastic, protected from weeds and soil molds/fungus. Today, we focused on the zucchini and squash- the foreman and I whipped out our knifes and started cutting 2in diameter holes down the center of the plastic wrapped rows (spaced 1 1/2 ft apart). After each cut we pocketed the plastic and dug a cone shaped hole with the dibble ~3in deep (squash seeds are big and need to be buried surprisingly deep). It took the rest of the day to cut out two of the three rows.
Tomorrow we'll finish up and hopefully lay in the seed.
Lots of field work ahead, onward tomorrow!
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