Family Update #13 - Spring/Summer 2020
Okay, maybe at this point we should just admit the family blog is quarterly. Spring and Summer was filled with beautiful and busy days as we adjusted to the not so normal new normal. We had many projects to keep us busy during quarantine and work around the homestead never seemed to stop. We prepared a new field, including drilling 800 holes that we filled with mulch in a failed effort to improve water infiltration. We hand dug rows for corn that the turkeys enjoyed long before harvest time. We purchased two cows only to lose the bull in less than 38 seconds. We sowed more squash, beans, lettuce, and hemp than ever before. However, despite our best efforts we reaped more humility this Spring than anything else. Even our first turkey hunt was an epic fail. But we did have many small victories: a bumper crop of peppers and tomatoes, litters of rabbits, 5 Easter lambs, and a 24x24 shade structure supported by poles that we cut, barked, and dried ourselves. God sent us many blessings: a fresh hind quarter of deer from a local highway patrol officer (yep, it sounds just like it is), buckets of wild blackberries and gleaned blueberries, a free pig from a friend who couldn’t process them all, a random drop off of groceries from an anonymous friend, and more too numerous to explain here.
The kids have been busy picking up extra work at a local farm, Isa is working as a Vet Nurse at a local veterinarian and Annie is back at college. She came home for a much too brief visit and in addition to celebrating her birthday took her brothers and sisters for an outing to a trampoline park. Dad’s new book comes out in October and a dozen articles fill the pages of Hearth and Field and Front Porch Republic. So much is going on, including the older kids new business venture into Hemp products for pets.
And the cow came home.
We added a beautiful Devon milker and handsome young Dexter-cross, which we owned for less than 38 seconds. We picked up the young bull and brought him to the paddock that we spent weeks clearing and fortifying. Only to have him escape into the wild and contribute to the feral bull population of middle Tennessee. He shot out of the trailer to our thunderous applause as we all gathered to witness the first of many small steps of cow ownership. It quickly turned into a much more valuable lesson of dad’s vincibility and ignorance. “Where did the bull go?” was not a question we expected to hear that afternoon. Nor spending four hopeless hours tracking it, realizing we just lost a year’s worth of meat. The bull did eventually return, the good news about poorly made fences is they are easy to break out of and back into.
Since then we have gotten a little better at owning cows, fortifying the fencing and learning the system to rotate them through the pasture for intensive grazing. We also built them a shade structure with milking area that even the little ones helped with.
Other homestead projects.
