Planting pics

Farmwork keeps us pretty busy but while we were waiting for the calf to be born, I brought my camera with me so I got a couple of the ever elusive farmwork pictures. This is from the last day of planting tomatoes - we bring lots of transplants down in the tractor and in carts, and use a post-hole digger to get nice deep holes for the tomatoes. Here Don's driving the tractor and Melissa's bringing one of the carts. Our work has shifted more to doing bigger time-blocks of one task. Last week we spent a whole day planting all of our storage cabbage - we poked holes in the black plastic, planted the transplants, watered them in, put up hoops, and covered them with row cover.




We had a crazy night last night - at 9pm there was a HUGE storm that came on really suddenly and sent me running for the cabins at top speed (don't want to get caught in the field in a thunderstorm, since i'd be the tallest thing around). We found out today that there was a tornado watch here. This morning when I walked up, I was pretty proud that none of the row cover had blown off, but I was looking at Lina, one of our beef cows. I often find myself looking at them and trying to figure out if they're behind the fence or in front of it, but today it really looked like she was in front of the fence. In fact, it looked like she was in the middle of the field. So I yelled to Katie, the next person walking up, and ran up to get Don and we all walked slowly behind her to get her into the next pasture.


Since Chloe had her calf Charlie, we've started milking her. I had my first day of milking today. It's pretty challenging. You bring her into a stantion so she can't move around, give her some grain to keep her occupied (well...to keep her occupied for the first 5 minutes at least) and then clean off her udder and sit on the milking stool to start milking. By that time, she's usually decided to go to the bathroom, so you have to swoop the milk bucket out of the way with your feet, scold her, shovel the manure out, and clean her up and start again. Today, it went pretty well until she kicked the bucket over when I was almost done. But we're still giving the milk to the pigs right now until she's done giving colostrum (the yellower substance she gives with nutrients for the calf the first week.