Some weekend chaos

[unicornduke]

I went to my parents this weekend for the first time since they opened for the fall business in september. It's all chaos all the time but it went decently. I took Mara to work Friday, where she was very good and then headed south to PA. It frosted pretty good that night, 30 degrees, so I had run down to my field with the dogs and stuffed as many peppers into my hoodie pocket as I could possibly fit.

Mara and Iggy hung out with my for that afternoon because my brother and his girlfriend had come up to camp and they had brought their dogs, now two of them. No baby gates, so I wasn't going to leave all the dogs alone while things were chaos. So Mara and Iggy got to sit in my truck and relax while I did stuff down at the selling area and then got to hop out and sniff around while I checked campfires for group outings and did the pepper harvest.









Saturday was the busy day, sunny, nice temperature and we did a lot of set up stuff that should have been done sooner but oh well. First weekend in October is usually just starting to get busy. We're debating on ways to get people to come out for the September weekends, first one has scarecrow making. I was thinking maybe an apple tasting thing on the second one. May or may not be a good idea. The next three weekends are going to be 10x worse with people so we did a lot of setup work in the hopes that we could get ahead. I'm a floater because I can do any job on the farm related to the fall business so I could be on register, picking pumpkins, driving tractors, running group outings, updating social media, etc etc. I did a little of everything. Dad got me trained up on the skidsteer, which is the latest and greatest piece of equipment. It is pretty rad.






I also harvested all of the hulless seed pumpkins that we planted. Hoping people try them because the seeds are delicious.



Sunday, woke up and it was misting. The weather site had kept pushing the rain forward every time we checked so that became a dud day. No one really comes out on rainy days and group outings usually cancel. Misted all day and turned a little rainy at times. I went and harvested a bunch of the beans and cowpeas and things that I had matured, although I didn't end up getting everything.

Coolest thing: I can grow peanuts! They don't have the biggest pods but look at them! They had full seeds inside so now they just need to cure and hopefully I can dry them for growing next year. I do want to try roasting the but I'm more concerned about saving the seeds for replanting right now.



Then I cleaned and roasted one of each type of hulless seeded pumpkin because dad wanted to do a little taste test. Everyone liked both types very much. They are super delicious.



I helped out some more with putting together a canopy, mostly chatting with dad though.

Then Monday, it poured. Me and the parents went out to breakfast and then I goofed around a little. Then did laundry and drove back up to home. This is also the second time this week Mara has watched me out the window of the truck like this:


 

Comments

[graydon]

Mara has an emphatic nose.

Yay! pumpkins. Also, yay! surviving the chaos.

[dragonlady7]

Zack wants a skid steer so bad. Is it awesome? Is it super awesome?
We are having shenanigans with the new livestock barn, which was specifically constructed so as to be super easy to clean out, and then specifically constructed three inches too narrow to be able to be cleaned out with the relevant tractor, and all attempts to do otherwise have failed and the manure spreader got stuck in there for a week (completely loaded with manure that my sister had painstakingly hand-forked in there over the course of two plus hours of backbreaking work) and finally my dad came up with the idea of jacking it up as high as the jacks would go and then using a winch to pull it sideways off the jacks, uphill, so it wouldn't be stuck anymore, and it eventually worked. (Had to do it twice.)
That's right, my dad, a master of the school of spending 40 years doing bullshit with inadequate equipment on extremely steep side-hills.

[unicornduke]

It is super awesome. If you fork a lot of things or scoop a lot of things, it is A++++ would highly recommend once you get good at it. They are wildly expensive though and dad got this one, not working, through a series of weird shenanigans and had it fixed up. Still a lot cheaper than it would have been.

I'm. How do you design and build something and have it be three inches too narrow??? That's something you check right?

Oh boy all around. That is some shenanigans. Fuck hand forking manure, that sucks.

[dragonlady7]

The barn's the right width.
The water spigot is three inches too far over, and cannot be moved.

[unicornduke]

Ahhhhhh oh no! That would cause an issue.

[dragonlady7]

(Ironically enough, hand-forking manure is the one farm job I have literal tons of experience at doing, as we kept our horses and were over it before Annie was old enough to be expected to help. That hasn't come up yet, though, and I am not reminding her. i'm having weird back pain problems, I am absolutely not taking a turn forking pig shit. I do a lot here but I draw that line.

(I'd do it if it was horses. It is Not.)

[unicornduke]

lmao, as much as I love farm work, sometimes it's okay not to volunteer for the terrible jobs, especially if you aren't getting paid in actual cash. Like, last weekend at my parents, I said, I could go pick pumpkins in the rain but I was not a full time employee and thus, set my own hours of not-picking-in-the-rain.