poop ain’t shit

Friday, January 10th
Yokna Patawpha Farm
Oxford, Mississippi

Warm weather is here! Well, in the 50s – which is almost t-shirt weather to us, thanks to the cold-hardening we underwent back home in the northlands – and over the past week even here.

A new WWOOFer came to the house today: Jason From Virginia, who’s now sharing the bunkbeds in the other room with Tom From the UK.

While Jeff and Jason From Virginia started pulling tools and such out of the incredibly cluttered tool shed on the edge of the field, Kristin and I got to work moving a pallet of pelletized poop – a hefty pile of bags of chicken poop fertilizer that needed to be moved to make room for parking various farm implements. We figured out a stable way to stack them and formed a 2-person assembly line, with Kristin picking them up and handing them off to me for stacking. When the pile was all moved, we pulled up the pallets they’d been stacked on, and shoveled the fallen poop from the damaged bags up into a couple of bins.

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This whole operation was completed much more quickly than we’d expected it to be, and we set upon the shed organization project with a vengeance, pulling out every single thing, classifying them into piles, cleaning out the shed, and returning the piles to the space in an ordered manner.

Shed Before (doesn’t really show just how crazy of a pile it really was, off to the sides, but you can get an idea through the dooway in this cropped shot from a few days back):

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Shed After:

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While we worked, a few mice made a home in the pockets of Jeff’s coat, hanging from the bed of the pickup truck – and when we were done and he went to put his coat on, they came scrambling and leaping out. Widget sprang to work to do her heritage honor, and quickly caught and harried one of the furry invaders.

After a break for lunch, we planted a couple of flats of tiny kale plants (the only plants on hand deemed likely to withstand the likely return of cold arctic air).

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We worked chicken poop into the soil ahead of the planting – the same poop we’d shoveled up and recovered from that morning … which was satisfying in some small way.

Before heading back to the house to clean up, we harvested a bunch of various-colored carrots to use for upcoming meals – starting with tonight’s dinner.

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They went into a soup with beans,and Yokna-grown broccoli, sage, & rosemary.  Kristin and I stayed home rather than go to a blues show at a bar in Oxford, to relax, read, soak up the farm’s energy, work on our own seed order for Que Sehra Farm in spring, and write this post.

It’s 1:50 am, the wind is howling outside and it’s been deluging on and off in waves for two hours.

Tomorrow will be Saturday, so no field work – I think we’re going to a party at the house of a couple that Doug is friends with.

OK I finally just got tired. Good night. Love locally.

 

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