It is a mystery

Almost done, just two group outings left, one Thurs night, one Fri morning. They had been scheduled for the previous Thursday but it rained a lot, so we rescheduled them. I had my employees start cleaning things up yesterday, emptying displays, cleaning up unused tables, etc. Today is the day a lot of people are stopping by to get pumpkins for their animals, so I'll have them pull off the displays and out of bins first, then from the field. 

My to-do list for the next day or two: 

• nap - today, woke up at 3am to use the bathroom, only managed to doze on and off until 7. and I had gone to sleep late. curses upon time changes for sleep schedule disruptions
• grocery store - overdue
• clean out fridge - there are things alive in there that shouldn't be
• fill out a form and mail it
• make pumpkin pie - lots of edible squash left, so I'll keep a bunch and a bunch will go to the food pantry this week
• crack garlic, get rototiller on tractor and plant it real fast

I've been playing video games and relaxing this morning, doing some spinning too. delightful

And the easiest one is last. This week will be busy, we've got three huge daytime outings tomorrow and Wed. I still need to text all my employees today but that might be the last work task of the day. that would be nice. we've got fun things planned for this coming weekend so I just need to make sure we're all ready. 

I need to dig through my yarn this afternoon, I'm planning to sell some at the weavers guild show and sale and the deadline for inventory is Wed. So I gotta get it done. I won't take much, I've barely worked on making things from what I've woven. Just piled it up. I will be tying off my current warp and planning to disassemble it for the move to the house since I'm contemplating how cold that shed will be and deciding I don't need to weave in that. I can't even wear slippers since I need to feel the treadles with my feet. 

I completely mucked up some farm things, my garlic didn't get in the ground and neither did any of the cover crops. mulling over what to do with that, not sure it's worth the seed.

I'm going to nap again today, more the better

Another good busy weekend, excellent practice for the employees. I was very cranky Friday night but pretty sure I hadn't eaten enough lunch or dinner. Much better feeling Saturday, but I also got the chance to drive a tractor at night which was lovely and nice. I was tired again yesterday but that's because it was so hot. 

We picked 24 tall bins of pumpkins this week and 8 short bins of various things. This isn't even half of what we have planted. I'm spending today, tomorrow and wed picking weird stuff because we have definite frost coming wednesday/thursday (predicted 36 and 34F so we'll be lower) and the weird stuff is often frost sensitive. Face pumpkins usually aren't to a light frost. Also rain coming tomorrow night, thank goodness because I haven't irrigated anything arg. Then thurs/fri picking big pumpkins. Plus all the group outings during the weekdays

Did find gluten free fig newtons at the store which is delightful. not as good as my homemade ones, but as good as OG fig newtons so I'm happy. 

Sleep has been hard to find, I get so keyed up with farm stuff by the time I get up to the house, eat dinner and do all the things i need to do, it's 9pm and I'm not quite tired, so I read for a bit. Plus calls and emails and reservations. it is go time. thankfully mom has been feeding me, I know my temper varies entirely by how hungry I am. 

Did enjoy browsing this collection of spindle whorls on the internet archive housed in the cleveland museum of art

much to do this week. at least I will have 2 hours of crafting tonight

Monday, I worked a half day, primarily running errands to pick things up for the farm. I took advantage of this and went to Wegmans and rediscovered how amazing it is. The gluten free section is huge! And clearly labeled! I gotta say though, the gf naan I got is far inferior to the pita bread I've been making. But I stocked up on things and found some new stuff to try. I was particularly impressed by the gluten free soups. 

That night during crafting, I was so fed up with how annoying it was to craft in the hallway between the spare room and my room (because there wasn't enough floor space for a 4 ft folding table to iron and assemble sewing stuff) that I spent an hour and a half of crafting cleaning and organizing. First, I took all the stuff that was stacked in my room that are important, plus all of the blankets and misc stuff that had been living on top of the box piles and tossed them all onto my bed. Then I took all of the boxes of my stuff that was in the spare room (fleeces, roving, yarn primarily) and stacked them up. I did put them in front of one of mom's shelves, but I determined nothing of urgency was on the shelf, reorganized so I could use one small shelf for my delicate keepsakes and then stacked my boxes floor to ceiling in front of the shelf. They are all light and there was enough of a corner next to my dresser that I was able to get three good stacks. this was almost every box I had in the space room. all light but bulky things

Then I took all of mom's bins that were in front of my closet, at the end of my bed and behind my door and put them in the newly cleared space in the spare room on the table there. Then moved my small shelves into my room and they are now usable! Shoved my book boxes, plus big luggage at the foot of the bed in between the bed and a shelf and then put all of my soft stuff onto the shelves. 

So in the end, I actually gained floor space in my room plus storage space plus I can possibly move my little crafting table into my room monday nights. it's so nice!

Then I had an absolutely baffling conversation with my mom which went something like: me: I cleaned my room and reorganized! her: why did you do that without me!!! I needed to look in there for a small bin!!! Me: but you'd turn it into an ordeal! and why would small bin be in my room? and you never mentioned this??? her: I told you I couldn't find small bin so you'd look for it in your room! it's gone forever!!! me: you never said it was in my room??? is that why you told me to keep an eye out for it? her: yes!

turns out I had opened small bin without ever looking at the label on it, been baffled by its contents, moved it to the spare room on top of her pile of stuff and she found it in less than a minute. if I had let her be involved, it would have been probably five hours of nonsense with lots of debate. I love her, but dear god, living with her and working with her on some farm stuff is too much. everything needs to be debated to death and back. the conversations I've had about the baked goods we're going to buy for the fall weekends is so incredibly irritating. I guess I need to get the kitchen in the church up and running so I never need to have that debate again. lol who am I kidding

tuesday night I made rice, curry chicken and roasted delicata squash and chickpeas, ate it all week, so tasty. 

Myself and employees have been slowly harvesting the first pumpkins of the season. Ours are all very late but the specialty stuff is what we need harvested, so tiny pumpkins, gourds, white pumpkins (since they go yellow in the sun easily), edible squashes. We bought a load of pumpkins from the auction to supplement until ours are ready. 

Yesterday, we had a big workday to get things done. I woke up at 4am and couldn't go back to sleep. We had five employees coming, one for her first day of work/training. There was an equipment auction, so my parents both went to the auction to see if any of the UTVs there would be good. A working UTV would be great but aughaugh. Trying to keep five people working on all different tasks that take different amounts of time and support is really difficult. But I managed. New employee is great so far, worked fast and came and found me when she finished things. I'll have her come back one night for training more. We're actually in decent shape as far as things go. My parents did buy me 11 nice new produce boxes with false bottoms, which are excellent for displays so I guess I can't complain that much. Me and the employees got a lot done so now we need the big stuff done, which I don't know how to do yet (hayfort, canopies) so I'm bothering dad about getting that done. Hayfort got done late yesterday, canopies this coming week.

Still absolutely baffled by the number of people that will come out to the farm without checking our facebook page, website, instagram page and/or answering machine to actually check if we are open, all of which I keep updated regularly. I think a lot of people just go: oh the grocery stores have pumpkins, so everyone is open for pumpkins

I have been irrigating so much. I'm trying to get the new grass seed to germinate that we no-tilled in, so I borrowed rainbirds from my uncle. Just. so much watering. I probably spend two hours a day on irrigation. Over a month without rain here and our total rain since beginning of August is around 4 inches. Pretty dire. But we have a 70% chance of rain on tuesday, so I'm hopeful we'll get something good. I guess I need to cover all of the things I've just been leaving outside because it hasn't rained in so long. There's also a 30-40% chance of rain the rest of the week, so we probably won't get any of that, or all of it. 

On Saturday nights, Jade and I have been watching the new season of Bake Off as it is releasing with text chat and then playing stardew valley on discord voice chat afterwards. it's been so nice, I miss her a lot. We go on break in October with the farm and catch up in November. 

I sent my parents away today to a n-scale train convention out in central pa somewhere. my dad sounded so wistful about going, so I decided that he should, my mom went along for fun. my dad said as he went out the door "us leaving the farm a week before opening is a sign at how good things are going because of you" which was nice to hear since I feel like we aren't ready yet but not to an extent that I can't let him go do something fun for a day. the house is nice and quiet right now. tasks for today: move rainbirds and irrigate, harvest some things, start display setup, look at phone stuff. I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't get back to sleep until 6 or so when I should have gotten up so I'm sleepy and slow to start work today. ah well.

I'm staying up late to extra enjoy the quiet house right now. okay day, got some work done like all the drip tape pulled from one old strawberry field, but also something related to the oil on the cultivating tractor went, maybe a burst o-ring. I thought about texting my dad but they're away and I don't actually need the tractor for tomorrow. irrigation is going slowly. one place we irrigate from is a little bay but right now the creek is so low the bay doesn't refill fast enough, so I'm irrigating those blocks 45 minutes at a time with a 15 minute refill period. deeply annoying. I'm moving the pump again tomorrow to the next set of blocks but that section of the creek fills fast so it's easier

also discovered why my truck had the check engine light on for the last two days. flat tire. or deflating tire. small rock punctured it, so I left the rock in it for now and reinflated it so I can still move it around if needed, but I'm using the farm truck to run around and actually get stuff done. I'm going to put my spare on tomorrow or monday and see if I can remove the rock and patch it and then that will be my spare tire.

I did get to meet a fellow weaver. my grandpa's partner has a friend up visiting who is a weaver, has sheep, spins, etc. they stopped by since they wanted to see my weaving stuff, so I showed them the shed, my wheels, my loom, the little bit of handwoven I had over there. it was a wonderful chat with a fellow fiber artist. she's got Leister longwools and has offered me some fleece if I stop by, so I'm going to take some of my handspun over to show off tomorrow. she recently came from a class at the John Campbell Folk School with Deb Robson (which I'm a little jealous) but she said I should go take that class even though it's expensive and it felt weirdly like a sales pitch almost. it was odd. but we got away from that soon enough. it was like she couldn't fathom there might be reasons why someone wouldn't be able to take a week off work and also pay a lot of money to learn stuff. 

things I haven't had at the same time: free time, money. but also if I had all the time and money in the world I wouldn't take a spinning class first. honestly. there's so many other things to learn about that I'm not an expert at already. aaaand I just looked up the cost of those classes. pricy!

she was really nice and invited me down to her place or maybe a local friend's place (reedrover  I think she knows your normal shearer so she might be vaguely in your area) for some kind of fiber gathering in October. It was nice of her but October is too busy. I felt a little bad because my grandpa's partner is a nice lady but she knows so little about fiber stuff that she just said some weird things to try and be relatable in the conversation but it came across very oddly. I have some feelings about her that aren't always positive so I try and let stuff go (she is a Deeply Normal Person and sometimes attempts to make the rest of us be normal which like, l o l, good fucking luck. also I got the impression that when she started dating my grandpa, she wanted to be a grandma to us cousins but none of us were having it, we already had a grandma and we'd all grown up extremely close to Real Grandma and didn't appreciate it especially because most of us were at least teens before B arrived) funny how moving makes one contemplate relationships and things

I have packed one weekend in september with both a Ren Faire trip and a fiber fest trip back to back days, so that's uhh. good I guess. bad for getting farm work done but oh well. I'm hoping some of the local weavers guild will be at that fiber festival so I can talk to them. I might try and join it for the winter. I am 3/4 done threading heddles on the loom and I've been doing some spinning, so project progress! I need to get back to posting pictures of things

nothing horribly bad, just odd. it was really hot, hit 90f with 60% humidity all day. closed early, sent my workers home early, spent the morning doing some irrigation. I didn't have any urgent tasks, so I weeded, which I find quite nice and soothing. 

part way through the morning, something was in my eye causing blurry vision. not anything large enough to make my eye hurt and I couldn't see anything, but it was deeply disconcerting to have a blurry section in my eye. it might have been weird sweat? eventually it went away once I blinked a lot. may have also been something from my new spinning project

one of the pumps stopped pumping water and I didn't notice until I went down to switch the blocks, it was running dry for probably an hour after running fine for 20 mins while I fixed a line, so it's probably shot. unsure what caused it but it only started having problems after the o-ring fell out of the feed tube and I replaced it, but it was watering fine last week. augh. so we're down to one running pump. tomorrow I'm going to work on pump #2, which is down due to carborator/gas leak problem from earlier this year. there's a spare pump in the metal shed, which has a bad motor, so we might be able to take the pump off that one and slap it on the other. 

it's been so dry here. we got a quarter inch of rain on sunday and we're parched again. all the sludge puddles at the ends of some of the veggie rows dried up in a day. we might get more rain thursday, but three days of 90+F weather requires watering no matter what. super looking forward to three days of beautiful weather in the 70s later this week. we're going to do a campfire friday night

I have my new atom L mostly set up and ready to go. I figured out that my secondary instagram account (fiber arts) is 2FA locked out, only options are: previous device, authenticator app, backup codes. I have none of those. So I decided to get a new tank mini screen. It feels silly to do that, but given my track record, I will break another phone within a year and it can be backup. And then I can get my instagram account unlocked properly and change the 2FA

I finished a yarn yesterday, spent some time in the shed, rotated the loom and repaired my skein reel, so once I whittle a new peg I will be able to skein off the yarn I've spun and post about it. 

and it's only tuesday. 

I'm looking forward to having tomorrow completely off work. Well, mostly. I worked Monday last week due to urgent pumpkin planting and the heat wave and I actually took a nap yesterday afternoon on the couch after lunch and didn't do all that much work after lunch. My last day off was Saturday and I spent all day at the SCA event. Sometimes the body just is done. 

My plan to wake up early, work until it got really hot and then spent some time in the creek worked extremely well. I literally just change into shorts and my rubber boots and head down. The creek is extremely cold at the best of times, it's all spring fed from the mountains and mostly shaded by trees in our neck of the woods, so it cools me off quick and makes my feet nice and cold within 20 minutes of being fully submerged and they stay cold for several hours. It's fantastic. 

I'm not actually sure what days we did what, but there was field prep of plowing and disking various fields in various states of ready, laying plastic (biodegradable plastic), my dad planting bare ground with the planter, and both of us planting into the plastic with the dorker planter (not sure why my dad and uncle call it the dorker, it's not the brand or anything), transplanting the giant pumpkins, irrigating and fertigating the vegetables and strawberries, and setting up the selling area for opening for raspberries and blueberries. I had employees working as well, although on the hot days, I sent them home at noon. The 14 year old forgot his water bottle on tuesday, so I gave him two from the cooler that we sell, told him to take at least a five minute break in the shade every hour and take another water bottle when he walked home. He was mostly weeding things. I had my other employee using the cultivating tractor, weed wacking the deer fencing. I started setting up the deer fencing in the strawberry field by the house since the deer are eating it, just need to buy handles when I go to town tomorrow and I'll have it up and electrified by Tuesday. And we opened for raspberry and blueberry picking. One of the hot days, I drank six bottles of water by 2pm, two of which had added electrolytes. Sweated most of it out. There was a breeze that day, so it wasn't fully torture. Just mostly. 

We got so much done this week holy shit. I did other stuff too. And so did my parents. They had their first event in the church this weekend, so we spent a lot of time whipping that into shape. I feel back to full normal after being sick thankfully.

The urgent stuff is all done, so I spent some time this morning doing less urgent stuff. Weeding the raspberries, primarily the new patch to help keep the perennial weed problems down. And cleaning up the elderberry planting. It's definitely in rough shape, we probably won't have much of a harvest at all. They're european elderberries and a bunch of them have died, so we'll replace them with american elderberries which seem to thrive locally anyway. They're in the rockiest part of the farm as well, so it's good to have something perennial there. My dad and I talked about expanding the planting because there's so much interest in them, so that will be on the list for next spring. Shouldn't be too hard, all the irrigation is set up already, just would need to place landscape fabric and plant them in. A lot of the small crops have suffered for lack of attention. I've been working on the kiwiberries every time I'm nearby them and I trained the first canes perpendicular across the trellis the other day. Exciting! 

I've spent some time contemplating my social life or lack of. All the things I would do to make friends, volunteer, meetup groups, etc rely on a more consistent schedule than I can manage right now. To be fair, I have social things three nights a week right now, monday crafting, tuesday video games with sibs, saturday watching baking with J but those are all online. I need to do some things in person. I've texted one person who I've met up with inconsistently the last few years who lives locally, originally one of J's friends but we've chatted a bunch now and it's been enjoyable. Last year was so chaotic that I failed to meet up with her, so I apologized for that in the text. There's a Wed afternoon knitting group at the local library, but unless it's raining, I can't make that, especially with employees working. My dad usually has computer work Tues and Wed, so I have to be supervisor to workers. I should aim to find something going on Thursday or Friday nights since I now don't have employees working that late (high school kids worked after school this spring and early summer so my evenings were busy). The SCA stuff is shaping up to be good but only if I can commit to going to things, there's another event this Saturday that I was hoping to go to, but we're open all day sat for picking and it looks like it'll be sunny. 

But I'm the most content I think I've ever felt in my whole life. It's wild how solid I feel even with all of the irritation of my parents not moving out yet. I'm not anxious. I'm not worrying. I'm enjoying the work and the days are long but they don't feel that long. Some of that might be the testosterone and the joy I'm feeling from it. Some of it might be the work. It's just nice to be out doing physical work without the driving from previous jobs. So fun! I get to move and look at the beautiful views and the neat stuff on the farm. All the lilies are blooming right now! Growing things! That other people pick and enjoy! Spending time with family! I dunno. It's nice to enjoy this even while the political situation is *gestures*. did have a good convo with someone about USDA cuts to grants that help farmers, so that was a good win. 

Also I just finished Emily Tesh's Incandescent while sitting here on register and I am SCREAMING, I got 2/3 of the way through and rolled my eyes a bit and THEN THE THING AHHH

Strawberry season is a sprint. It comes early in the season, it's intense, it's constant. 

I have a cold. 

My mom got sick early this week and spent the first part of the week sanitizing every surface but also just continuing to sit downstairs and breathe in the same room as the rest of us. Probably she got me sick even before that but who knows. I know she doesn't mask at the stores. Her cold manifested as incredible coughing and she went to the doctor about it yesterday. My cold so far is sore throat and vague tiredness. 

I'm still working the register because I can't not. No one else can do the setup right now. Or that's not technically true, but my mom is involuntarily coughing and my dad is frantically planting pumpkins. I don't have any masks either. I've been running low and forgot to order more. I desperately wish I had some of the light medical masks but I haven't left the farm since Monday - before I felt sick. I've got all the windows and doors open on the RST and I'm sanitizing my hands...maybe my mom has some somewhere...

Thankfully, I have a new employee for the register. She's fantastic. She's a neighbor's teenage kid and she picked up the register work very quickly and is reliable. I'm so happy about it. We've got her working five hours a day, 4-5 days a week which frees me up to do farmwork. Or this week, probably go sleep. 

*adds this to the irritation pile* mostly I'm too tired to be irritated to be honest. ha, my mom texted back, she does have light medical masks and will bring my some. just need to figure out if I'll be open tomorrow with the rain we've got coming

ETA: I feel way better about working now that I've got a mask, my N95s would be way to hard to talk through, my throat is not standing up well to all this talking

Friday night, we pushed late and got all the plastic (biodegradable black mulch technically) laid for the vegetables. The pick your own veggies have suffered for a lack of marketing in the past, I'm hoping to fix that in the coming months. Typically we do tomatoes and peppers and a few other assorted things. My starts did so badly this year, I think it's the grow lights my parents have, I don't think the light lengths are correct for plants. We also buy in flats from Kube Pak for the more generic paste tomatoes and green bell pepper. 

Saturday it rained. Again. Inch of rain. We did planning for the church rental business, caught up on some planning stuff and did some other easy things. 

Yesterday, me and an employee got all 600 plants in the ground, woo! It took me a while to get the irrigation all figured out and then we picked rocks. It was 8:00pm by the time I got inside to eat dinner, checked the forecast and realized the overnight prediction had dropped to 39F. We run 5 degrees colder. Ack. It had also poured rain at some point, so everything was sopping wet. So I got all the leftover blueberry pots that my parents have stashed in the barn and dropped pots over top of each plant to gain a degree or two. Honestly, they probably didn't need it in the end, but c'est la vie. We had leftover plastic without plants, so I had my mom place an order with Kube Pak for some of their leftover/available trays of eggplants and a few herbs for shits and giggles to see if that makes sense with PYO. 

We're opening for strawberry picking starting on thursday, so I spent this morning running errands (groceries, truck plate change finally, perscription at cvs, etc) and I'm hopping off to do some baking in a few minutes (lemon bars as my snack for this week, chocolate chip muffins maybe, yogurt and calzones for dinner). All my free time has been absorbed in reading books and spinning so that's been fun

It's supposed to be in the 80s this week, ew

Monday was a delightful day. I went to local down T instead of slightly larger town D because I wanted to get a library card there too. I wandered through the grocery store and since the library didn't open until 10, wandered around the downtown looking at the shops. Found a restaurant I want to try that said they have gluten free options which is very cool. Made a couple of phone calls and then headed into the library. The librarian at the desk was extremely helpful and immediately pinged me as trans, asking if I had a preferred name and pronouns which I was pleased with. She emphasized I could use any bathroom I wanted and if anyone gave me trouble to come to them. Fantastic, really pleased. Then she gave me a tour! I haven't been to that library since like, 2005 or something so she took me around. They have a little bookstore in the back that you can buy books from all the time as well.

Then we really got chatting, turns out she's been to our farm, she has a farm with her siblings and they sell beef and chicken and honey. And then we started talking about fiber arts and all sorts of things. So that was a delight. She had some recommendations for places to find fun things in the area, books we chatted about and some other things. It was a delight. We connected on facebook so we can chat.

I made a maple banana custard pie with a oat flour shortbread crust which turned out incredible. The oat flour crust was in place of a graham cracker crust and I highly recommend it. I used oat flour that I made with my little flour mill, so it still had some texture (I think also a food processor would work) and it absorbed all the maple goo but also stayed a little bit crunchy. So good. Also made blueberry bars and bread. And tacos that night for dinner.

This whole rest of the week has been preparing for strawberry planting. Both of the tractors that can pull the plows developed leaks in the rear tires last week, so Tuesday I ran the second tire down to a tire place to be fixed and check in about the first tractor that went down. These are both the tires that had issues last year and were replaced with tubed tires. They suck. If they break again, we're buying new tubeless tires since those seem just fine given literally every other tractor tire last forever. This is second or third repair on both of those tubed tires. Did some other stuff tuesday like weed and take off seedheads in the rhubarb. We'll open those for picking next week after we mow around them. 

Wednesday, I worked on irrigation setup and then picked the tractor tires up. That night, dad and I put them on using the bobcat skidsteer which was pretty quick in comparison to normal efforts.

Thursday I plowed. It went pretty quick, we have a four bottom plow and the hardest part of getting the starting rows straight since you put your tire into the track of the previous plow pass. Then. More irrigation work. Dad put our worker on disking which went decently while dad worked on fertilizer.

Friday we realized that the forecast was looking dire, with at least three days of all rain starting saturday night. Given we usually do a saturday/sunday planting, this was bad. So we kicked into high gear. I did more irrigation work (ugh!) which is tedious and difficult. But I got the water running and the lines flushed and then had to reconfigure the setup at the start of the strawberry field. Then I trenched the supply line using the middle buster, laid out the distance flags for dad to aim at (every five rows and you align on the tractor tracks for the rest of the rows), and did something else.

We got planting around 4pm in the end, which was fine. After 12 rows, we turned the irrigation line on and absolutely blew the pressure way too high whoops. So we turned on some of the strawberry blocks from last year and also turned the power down on the pump. Learned where all the leaks were in last year's block and ignored them. There's always a lot of leaks, mostly from animals chewing the lines since we didn't renovate those berries. They desperately need to be weeded. On the list.

Mom and I were on the planter, dad was driving and our worker followed along and made sure the berries were fully in the ground. Worker left around 7pm, the rest of us kept planting until 8.

To do after I finish eating breakfast/typing this: finish trench down at west, plant until extra competent worker arrives, go do trenching, irrigation setup in the field next to the house including moving the pump (ugh) since we only have one running pump right now. The other two were at the shop being fixed and I got the text yesterday that they were done. Looks like almost a quarter inch of rain coming overnight but between all the workers and the effort, we might get most of it all done. The planter is so slow (.83mph) and there's a lot of rows to do, so my dad said we usually manage an acre a day. A half acre got done yesterday (a quarter of the plants), so we'll see what we can do.