Farm Sitting Part 5: Garden Fresh Produce

You might wonder how a suburbanized girl like myself ended up farm sitting. I met the family originally through church. The wife played the organ for our services and I led the singing so we got to know each other. I knew they planted a large garden every year partly because I had gone over and picked green tomatoes right before the frost hit last year and let them ripen on my counter. They didn't all make it, but I had tomatoes for a while.

Last January, I was really wishing for spring and growing things and missing my own garden space. The previous year I had planted two tomato plants at another family's house and had enjoyed fresh tomatoes and some beans, but I wanted more this year. I called this other family up and asked if I could help them with their garden in exchange for some space to grow my own things. I wanted to be able to work as much as I wanted the produce. I missed planting lots of different things and seeing them all grow. My initial plan was just to see if they would let me have a small section to plant whatever I wanted, but it was easier just to help them with everything and share in the produce. They plant fifty-foot rows of tomatoes, beans, corn, squashes and potatoes.

Towards the end of May, I went over and helped plant a row of tomatoes and one of squash. We also did for rows of beans--two bush, two pole. The last thing we did that day was plan two rows of potatoes. It was nice to know more got done because I was there. Since then I have gone over and weeded, replanted tomatoes, and helped set up the trellis for the pole beans.

As part of the bargain, I agreed to watch the farm while they were out of town, which wasn't going to be often. They are actually going to be gone again, but my sister and her kids are going to be down visiting so it wouldn't work.

Unfortunately I don't have many pictures of the garden, but I took a few while I was there. I spent a good part of Thursday picking beans, raspberries, and weeding potatoes. Here's a picture of the beans. We planted the bush beans next to the pole beans so that once the bush beans were done, we could pull them out and get at the pole beans a little more easily. The pole beans weren't on, but there were enough bush beans for me to do my first bit of canning (that's for another post).


As it is such a large garden and only two busy people working on it regularly (I would have gone over more, but I was gone for three weeks of the summer), the potatoes got rather over run with weeds. Most of what you see in the first picture are weeds. While these two are not before and after pictures, they give you an idea of how many weeds I pulled. I think there were eight rows of potatoes and two of them were weeded. I weeded maybe a third of the others. It was rather tricky because I had to make sure I wasn't pulling up the plants. Even after learning to recognize which were weeds and which were potato plants, I had to start at the top of the weed and follow it to its base to make sure I was pulling the right plant. After I accidentally broke off a branch of potato plant while trying to extricate a particularly large weed, I stopped. I should have taken a picture of the pile of weeds.

The part I didn't weed:

The part I did:
As I mentioned, I spent most of the day Thursday working in the garden. I had prepared a lunch, but forgot it at home. I didn't feel comfortable raiding their kitchen, but I didn't want to go home. The wife had mentioned I could try some of the new potatoes, so I looked for some in the newly weeded section. I had already picked beans and raspberries, so I had those. I added some swiss chard to the lot and went in to prepare lunch. I fried up the potatoes, steamed the chard and washed some beans and raspberries. It was one of the best lunches I'd had for a while.

Farm Sitting Part 4: Cats and Dogs

Cats and dogs are as natural to a farm as cows, chickens, and pigs. Farms are large enough to allow a dog lots of space and the barns provide mice for the cats. This farm was no exception. The first three animals I fed were Ramses, the cat, and the two dogs--Davy and Terry. Ramses actually belonged to the couple's daughter away at collage. He decided to be my particular friend and followed me around sitting in the shade of the beans while I picked them and licked my arm while I dangled my feet in the swimming pool. He even challenged Davy once when Davy came over to be loved. He still liked me even after I stepped on his foot because he was so close to me. Here's Ramses:



Terry is an old dog who has to have his food soaked in water. (No picture of Terry, unfortunately) Ramses and Terry were fed in the garage and Davy got his food outside. I quickly learned the reason for this. I suppose this was the first benign mistake I made. After having fed all three, I must have gone back in side to get something (goat milk maybe) and Ramses was meowing like he was hungry. I realized that both Terry's and Ramses' food were gone and rather too quickly. Davy! I re-fed the cat and dog and kept the door closed so Davy wouldn't get at it. I learned to shut Terry and Ramses in the garage for a while so that Terry would actually eat his food before Davy could get in there. This was especially true at the evening feeding since all three got shut in the garage overnight. I even started putting Ramses food on top of the freezer so that he had food even when Davy was in there. Here's Davy lounging on the grass while I did the chores.

Ramses wasn't the only cat, however. A wild mama had adopted the red barn as her home (probably because they fed her) and had babies there. I'm not sure even the owners know exactly how many cats call the barn home. I knew there were at least three, but I never got a good enough look at the ones I saw to know if there were more. They would hide under the barn, watching me warily as I approached to feed them and the chickens. As soon as I was too close, they hid their faces. It's a good thing I have a excellent zoom feature on my camera, or I may not have been able to take a decent picture. Here are two of the cats hiding under the barn.

Farm Sitting Part 3: Moo--Shriek = I'm Hungry

Meet the cows: There are four mamas, four babies, and one steer. As far as I know, they don't have names. The steer will end up in the freezer. I don't know what will happen to the others. The mama that makes all the noise is behind the fence post. Did you know that cows would make that sound? She was hungry.



These cows got two bales of hay morning and night and took the longest to feed. Two bales is a lot of hay and I seemed to get half of it on me and inside my clothes. I was amazed at the places I found hay later on. The cows got a lot on them, too; watch what happens in the video. You can also sort of see how the bale is divided into flakes. Another thing of note, though you can't really see it in the video, is that the cows would go after the hay that I was currently shaking down. They seemed to vie for the "freshest" despite the fact that I tried to put some hay all along the trough as quickly as possible. I even noticed that they weren't so happy about the bale of hay that had been sitting directly on the ground, preferring to sort through to find the hay from the bale off the ground. Man were they picky!



I don't know about your mama, but mine always told us chew politely and not eat like cows. Cows are noisy eaters. The sound on this video doesn't do it justice; you get more hay rustling and less chewing noises. It was the opposite in real life. Listen carefully and you can hear them chewing their cud.



As they ate, they seemed to eat as much as they could right where their head was leaving a indent in the hay. It was most noticeable after the first bale of hay, but you could still see it after the second which is when I took this picture:



Those weren't the only cattle. There were two visiting heifers penned with the bull--I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that. Here's one of the girls:


There were also Honey and Cow in the front pasture. I don't know if this is Honey or Cow. If it's Honey, she's safe. If it's Cow, well there's a reason she doesn't have a proper name.

Okay, so for some reason I deleted the picture of Cow/Honey. That's sad since they deserve some recognition as part of a benign mistake. It was the morning of the last day, Friday, and I had finished the chores, fried up some fresh egg and new potatoes for breakfast, and was reading my scriptures. All of a sudden, I realized I hadn't fed the girls up front yet. It was about 9 am--at least an hour after when they normally would have been fed. I raced out there to find them not-so-happily waiting for me. If Cow has a little less meat on her bones, well, they can take it out of my portion.

I was informed when I went to be trained that I would get some of the meat when the animals were slaughtered. Fresh meat and eggs-YUM!

Farm Sitting Part 2: What's that got to do with the price of eggs?

Movie quote--any takers?

For the most part, the two and a half day stint at farm sitting went very smoothly. No one jumped the fence or got sick. However, I made a few relatively benign mistakes that made things a little more interesting.

Fed after the cats and dogs, the chickens got an ice cream size bucket of feed twice a day plus six or seven handfuls of wheat as scratch in the morning. In the evenings, I collected the eggs. I officially started my farm sitting experience Wednesday evening and so got to collect the eggs right off. I don't know if this is standard farm procedure, but the chickens had a dark box where they laid their eggs. The box opened into the storage part of the barn making egg collecting rather easy.


Two of those eggs were not laid in the box. There were a few hens who preferred more light when they felt the urge to lay, but they were consistent with the placement and I never had to go looking for eggs. Here's a picture of the "rogue" eggs:
There were actually two sections to the chickens. One with about eight hens, and another with two hens and a rooster. When the owner walked me through everything, she said that she thought she saw a chick in the second section, but hadn't verified it. Neither of the hens in this section laid their eggs in the boxed area (a different one from the one in the picture) and you had to move the hen out of the way to get at the eggs. The owner told me to just grab the tail feathers and show her who's boss.

When I went to collect the eggs from this section, I did just that. And that was my mistake. There was a chick (I could see it) and I got soundly nipped as I tried to move the hen to get the eggs. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had used my head (not to gather the eggs). Everyone knows that you don't bother a mother with young and I did it anyway. Yes I had seen the chick and I did it anyway. To make matters worse, I hadn't worn gloves so I got a nice peck on my palm. It wasn't more than a scratch, but it stung throughout the rest of the chores (or maybe that was my pride). Here's the ferocious hen and her baby.

The rest of the hens and rooster were never a problem. Of course I never tried to grab their tail feathers.
Thanks to these obliging chickens I haven't had a store bought egg for a while.

Farm Sitting Part 1: Drink all your milk!

Meet Lucy and Amy:
I believe Lucy is the older goat and Amy is the baby, but I'm not really sure. I just know I had to feed them. [Editor's Note: These names are switched. Amy is the adult, and Lucy is the baby. From this point on, the names are correct.] Lucy's mom died and so has to be bottle fed "goat formula" morning and evening. She still eats hay--they got 1 flake of hay each morning and evening. (Apparently something about the baling process causes a bale of hay to become divided into sections or flakes. Think of it as a stick of butter that easily divides into pats when it's unwrapped. If you'd like to actually see, feel, smell and taste your own flake of hay, go here.)

Here's a picture of Lucy eating the hay:
I tried to get a picture of both of them eating, but Amy doesn't like anyone watching her eat. She would extricate herself from the hay bin and watch me warily.

My favorite part--of the whole experience actually--was giving Lucy her bottle of "goat formula" (the official name was something like goat milk replacement with some probiotic added in). Since the bottle was just a used soda bottle, I had to hold the nipple onto the bottle otherwise she would pull it off in her excitement. As a result, I had goat slobber and milk on my hand. Yum.

Despite that, there is nothing better than having a person or animal be so excited to see you. When Lucy saw me coming, she went crazy. If she was outside the barn when I came up, she would race to the barn. No matter what, she bleated like she hadn't been fed in a week and jumped up on me when I entered the pen. I videoed the process the last time I fed her. Check out the tail wagging! You can also hear the ponies and the cows letting me know they were hungry, too. (Chickens. cats, and dogs were fed first, then the goats followed by the ponies and cows/steers/bull. More about them later.)