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Worth Thousands of Words

Sorry folks, with yet another monsoon currently inundating our fields (I can literally hear cats and dogs falling outside), I’m going to try again with a week off so no pickup this week. After my last email begging for a day off, I woke up to headless chicken bodies scattered everywhere and a truck that wouldn’t start and in need of towing. Not much of a day off! Maybe I’m just destined to never have a day off…we’ll see come Monday.

Pictures are going to do all the talking this week because Jenni and I are running on very little sleep right now. In fact, I made Pat order me around while moving chickens the other day because my brain stopped computing. Paddy Rose was up a million times a few nights ago, and when she finally stopped waking up, Nora started carrying on. They’re conspiring against us already!!

Captions:
1: My baby being towed away (don’t worry it’s back now).
2. Something got into the chicken pen Sunday morning and it wasn’t the sweet unicorn (3) in the next picture. Sorry for the graphic picture, but farming is rough sometimes. I only found 6 bodies, so it could have been (or maybe was) worse. If this inspires you to keep chickens, please let me know as I am selling the survivors. I do this every year – we don’t have a very hospitable location for chickens up on the hill in the winter.
4. We planted the last of the high tunnel seedlings and tightened up some gaps on Thursday. It’s probably too late to get much out of it, but as another farmer told me, at least now I’ll know when too late is. In case you’re wondering, in the tunnel we planted lettuce, spinach, kale, bok choi, salad turnips, mustard greens, swiss chard, tokyo bekana, tatsoi, cilantro, and vitamin green. Ambitious, optimistic…and likely foolish!
5 and 6: Some greens like parsley and lettuce are still going strong despite everything. I JUST realized maybe nature is telling us not so subtlety what we should be eating…but only if you stop and think about it. Parsley especially. I’ve been continually more impressed by how the parsley is doing as it thrives while everything around it dies. But I didn’t have one bunch of it last month! Must be the sleep deprivation. How much more obvious can it get? Want to be disease free, pest free, and practically indestructible? Eat mor chikin parsly…you are what you eat right? It’s going to be one of my missions next year to inspire a parsley craze.

See you in a week!

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